Nik Collection 7 Review and Demo

[@rsearun2620]

Brilliant. I've just aquired Nik, and you've helped immensely with the learning curve. Thank you.

[@chriswrightphotographs]

Thanks! There’s a lot to discover in the Nik Collection, I’m sure you’ll get great results.

[@alonzohollingsworth7712]

Great illustration of the newest version of NiK Collection 7. I'm already a member of the DxO family and have been pleased with all it's products I've chosen to purchase for years now. Those being NiK Collection, PhotoLab and ViewPoint. However, when an upgrade hits the market for any of the photo editing software programs I use, I do my due diligence and wait for reviews and illustrations of them such as yours and Robin Whalley's to help make my decision to upgrade now or wait. After watching both, I've decided to upgrade now as well as become a subscriber to your channel as a good resource. Great video, and thanks for sharing. Cheers..👍

[@chriswrightphotographs]

Thank you , I’m glad the video has been useful!

[@picklebird1261]

Most helpful review of the new features of NIK Collection I've seen! Thanks so much! Catherine D

[@chriswrightphotographs]

Thank you, that's great to hear!

[@herveblanchon1530]

Brilliant explanation and demonstration!! Thanks!

[@chriswrightphotographs]

Glad it was helpful!

[@alexyphotoman9716]

Another excellent presentation - thank you. I usually wait for the Black Friday sales to upgrade, but November is so far away.... Cheers!

[@chriswrightphotographs]

Thanks Alexy!

[@Yalelax]

Thanks very much for your necessarily brief demonstration of some of the new features in NIK 7. I believe that many who use Photoshop and Adobe Camera Raw will find the same adjustments easier to apply using layers in the former and newer masking tools in the latter. Painting an adjustment on a mask in Photoshop is intuitive and needs no sophisticated knowledge. Where I believe I might find NIK 7 useful is to experiment with some of the adjustments and learn additional editing approaches. Luminosity masking whilst possible in NIK seems to be much easier to accomplish using the Adobe editing tools. Color grading is certainly simple in Adobe Camera Raw and IMO there is no comparison in the ease of color editing in PS/ACR vs. NIK. Clearview is one of the filters that I find difficult to equal in Photoshop. For any who desire to experiment with AI as applied to photographic editing programs other than NIK will be necessary. Indeed, regarding AI, I find no program equal to Photoshop However, as Chris noted, for those seeking to avoid the Adobe model NIK will certainly prove to be an excellent choice; based on very preliminary evaluation I second his thoughts. It is great to have NIK as an editing tool. I look forward to more educational content Chris.

[@chriswrightphotographs]

Thanks for the thoughtful input. One further thought - ACR has no equivalent in the Nik Collection. If you are shooting in RAW format then preliminary processing of the RAW file can be done in ACR, Lightroom or DxO PhotoLab and the results "finished off" in Photoshop or the Nik Collection. The equivalent workflow to (ACR and Photoshop) or (Lightroom and Photoshop) is (PhotoLab and Nik Collection). A strength of the Nik Collection is that it is also very well integrated with Photoshop so can be and often is used in the Adobe Workflow as well. Also worth noting that DxO's PureRAW product delivers arguably better demosaicing and noise reduction than ACR or Lightroom and can be used as a pre-processor in the Adobe workflow.

[@stefanmarch]

Thanks for the excellent explanation of the new features in Nik Collection. I appreciate this was a demo of Nik but I could not help thinking that much of what you demonstrated could have been done much easier in Photolab without having to come out of the RAW workflow. I'm a fairly experienced Photolab Elite 7 user and recently added Filmpack 7. I haven't bought Viewpoint as most of the functionality is already in Photolab. I tend to use Affinity as an addon to Photolab and create layers to Topaz AI and / or Nik Collection 5. I mainly use Nik Silver Efex, occasionally experimenting with Color Efex. Would be interested in hearing what you feel I could achieve in Nik 7 which I couldn't do in Photolab. I'm inclined to hold off upgrading to Nik 7.

[@chriswrightphotographs]

Your trajectory with Nik Collection is very similar to mine - I used Silver Efex for years before starting to dabble with Color Efex. My take is this - Color Efex gives us a high level/accessible way of achieving things that would otherwise require detailed knowledge of photoshop/affinity to achieve in a much longer and more complex fashion. The use of control points and lines to target a filter on a specific area is not achievable with PhotoLab because you don't have the filters. Similarly stacking filters and effects in the way I demonstrate cannot be done on PhotoLab - Obviously you can have multiple control points, but you don't have the filters. There are also some things that I'm sure will arrive in PhotoLab in due course - elliptical control points, hsl as a filter, the new outline tool, ClearView as a filter. For me, this update has made Color Efex a usable and regular addition to my workflow. Even if I'm working in Photoshop, I don't feel I'm compromising anything by branching into Color Efex. My gut feeling is I should have looked harder, earlier, but my loss!

[@stefanmarch]

@@chriswrightphotographs Thanks for your reply, I've downloaded Nik 7 trial and will see how I get on.

[@IanWheldale]

I swore I would miss 7 and wait for 8, but the beggars go and add something major so the debit card came out already. Looks to solve the workflow issue we discussed a couple of videos ago.

[@chriswrightphotographs]

Pretty much. They have done a great job with this update, building out from the unified code base completed last year. Naturally this raises expectations for next year, but DxO seem to have the right approach - slowly and carefully is better than rushing at new features for the sake of it.

[@ianforber]

DxO have spent over 6 months getting v6 working on my laptop (kudos to them for their efforts). I’m tempted by v7 but I’m wary of going back to it not working. I know I can keep v6 alongside v7 but that just seems to me way too tricky.

[@chriswrightphotographs]

What was the problem? Might be useful to others with similar set ups?

[@ianforber]

@@chriswrightphotographs I don’t know the underlying tech problem. It manifested itself by me being unable to open most of the apps either standalone or as plugins for Capture One. I couldn’t open the main ones like ColourFX or SilverFX but the smaller ones such as Define or Perspective were OK. My MacBook Pro is a 2017 model with 16GB of RAM. The DxO developers sent me zip files 3 times over a period of 6 months that monitored what was happening and each time asked me to uninstall the version I had and install the latest, updated version. Didn’t work so in the end they sent me instructions to open Terminal and enter instructions to revise some code. It worked.

[@chriswrightphotographs]

Strange. I found performance on my old MacBook Pro became dismal, and even on my intel based Mac mini it’s not terribly fast but usable. I bought an M3 based MacBook a couple of months ago and performance is way better.

[@ianforber]

@@chriswrightphotographs Now it works, it’s useable. Not super fast but good enough for me. No idea why the software wouldn’t even open before the fix. I’m thinking of getting a Mac Mini to make it easier/cheaper to upgrade the computer in future. Just waiting for the next gen to be released.

[@chriswrightphotographs]

Yes, Mac Mini is the most bang for your buck in the Apple range. I’m waiting for the Mac Studio with M3 chip. More expensive, but better for video editing. Rumour was June release but I haven’t heard anything for a month or so.

[@sv0616]

I tried to upgrade to Nik Collection 7 from Nik Collection 5 and was told that I have to pay full price. When I reached out to the DxO representative, I was told that they could be charging me "$79 for upgrade from v5 to v6 and $89 from v6 to v7, so, instead of charging you individually to upgrade we charge the $159 new price" . Isn't that like saying if I upgrade from iPhone 13 to iPhone 15, Apple should charge me for Apple 14 as well. Too frequent upgrades with minor changes and I have to pay full price for each upgrade. No, Thank you.

[@chriswrightphotographs]

I understand, $159 is a lot of money. These companies work to pretty tight margins and all we can do if price/value doesn’t work for us is go elsewhere. Not sure the iPhone is a fair comparison, it’s a phone not a photo processing app and costs about 5 times as much. (That might be a minority opinion though!) Good luck with the hunt!

[@sv0616]

@@chriswrightphotographs Thank you for the response, Chris. Do any of DXO peers have the same model that you know of? Why not just change to a subscription model.

[@chriswrightphotographs]

@@sv0616 If we're talking about DxO ie. including PhotoLab, ViewPoint etc, the only other companies I have in depth experience of are Adobe, Capture One and Luminar. DxO (PhotoLab) compares favourably with Adobe if you upgrade every other version, but it doesn't support layer based editing. so there's that. When I was a commercial photographer in the UK I used Capture One, it is functionally excellent but there is no upgrade path - what you buy, you keep at €349 - they have a tiered subscription model too, the cheapest being €18.25 a month. I opted to move from Capture One to a hybrid workflow of DxO and Adobe depending what I am trying to achieve. I won't comment on Luminar because they have moved a long way from the versions I am familiar with so any comment I make now would be ill informed and probably unfair! I guess the reason the pricing plans for all vendors are so complicated is they don't find it helpful to sales to be compared solely on price. Comparing like for like is practically impossible so I assess the upsides against price - DxO excellent at core function (RAW Processing), Stable, integrates well with Adobe, short learning curve. Adobe, feature rich, affordable, for Photoshop a nearly endless learning curve! Capture One, competitive with DxO, Expensive. If all software cost the same, and I had endless finances, I'd use DxO for RAW processing, Capture One for studio work, Photoshop for layer based editing. Because finances proved not to be endless, something had to give and I elected to drop Capture One. I still think it's excellent but I can't afford it! Comparing Nik is hard because as far as I know it's one of a kind. DxO have completely rewritten the codebase and it works really well as a user friendly finishing tool. The results in the last two versions are of professional standard although it's still possible for the user to create horrible effects! Also worth bearing in mind that the image processing industry is dominated by Adobe, and a wise person would look to evidence of financial stability before buying into a rival software. DxO appear to have that, as do Capture One. Also check forums and google "problems with xxxx" for competitor software, bearing in mind of course that people find it easier to complain than praise! Not sure if this is helpful, and apologies for length!

[@hanahoeo7073]

Well looks like I’ll be doing an upgrade

[@alessandrociampi1811]

i have update from 5 to 6 end 2023 now a new update? one update every 6 months is too much

[@chriswrightphotographs]

The major updates are what you pay for, issued once per year. Within that, minor updates are not charged. It sounds as though you bought v6 midway through the cycle (late in 2023). A lot of people have done this, some within weeks of the major version upgrade which is a bitter pill to swallow, however DxO don't hide this, and other manufacturers have similar terms on upgrades.

[@johnm6504]

I purchased Nik Collection 6 about six - seven months ago and also felt that more of a break to upgrade should have been given to customers like us. I contacted DxO and they wouldn’t budge.

[@chriswrightphotographs]

It’s a 12 month cycle. You bought in the first half and expect a free upgrade? You’re not alone, but the cost of doing business this way would inevitably push the price of the software up. Personally I’d rather it stayed affordable and I can opt to upgrade once or twice every two years.

[@Daniel_Zalman]

Came of age but lacks AI selection tool which are available in LR/PS/CaptureOne? I see.

[@chriswrightphotographs]

I ‘n not sure I agree that an AI selection tool would signify maturity. As a sometime software engineer I recognise value in good design and progressive enhancement. And of course the quality of the images that can be produced. Some AI tools are excellent, such as Photoshops generative AI, but not all and I can think of one company who have boasted about AI for several years now. Their software I’m afraid is a mess. So far as software design is concerned give me slow and stable progress and I’m happy.

[@Daniel_Zalman]

@@chriswrightphotographs I see. For me, these are extremely incremental changes to justify an upgrade for 90 bucks. A year of LR/PS is $99 (i believe, if you pay up front for a year).

[@dxflow3271]

@@chriswrightphotographs couldn't agree more!