Do I need Nik Collection?

DxO PhotoLab
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Would you care to tell us what?

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Weird effects like Glamour Glow, for example. Or the dynamic skin softener.

Sure, you can approximate those results with PL+FP too, but it takes much more effort and the result is not exactly the same.

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no it’s not, if it was integrated there wouldn’t be the need of having .tiff files, you could have an extra panel like FP and VP have, or make nik panel beside the Fx panel in PL if they don’t want to work with “layers”.

you click “filter” which is above preset. that’s where the tools are and where the magic began.

some prefer canon while others like leica, a vespa is still the best looking scooter than any others =]

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I’m really tired about this, so please see

and note, I’m NOT on a mission (like some)

.

For those who like to know what I wrote about Nik …

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One of the most powerful features of Color Efex, which I use a lot, is that you can layer the filters and change the order on the stack. This level of control goes well beyond what PL on its own can provide and is, IMHO, worth the price of admission. And, on top of it, you can then create your own preset with your filter stack. But, yes, the TIFFs are much larger than the RAWs.

One thing that surprises me is that DxO didn’t bring the enhanced U-Points of Nik Collection 7 to Photo Lab 8. Maybe next time?

As always, your mileage may vary. I’m glad DxO provides an excellent set of tools that allows me to select the right combination to complete my vision for any given photograph.

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For my workflow, NIK makes more sense. I rarely use a digital camera, but I do use film cameras nearly every day. My film workflow entails

  1. Process film.
  2. Create a Contact Sheet by batch scanning negatives as low-quality Jpegs.
  3. Examine contact sheet, selecting candidates.
  4. Scan each candidate into a high-quality Tiff.
  5. Use PhotoMechanic to (1) add metadata for each TIFF, and (2) Associate each TIFF to its appropriate Catalog and Collection.
  6. Use Affinity to edit each TIFF; specifically use Inpainting brushes to remove scratches, dust, …, etc.,
  7. Still within Affinity: Use NIK SilverEfx and sometimes DFine to generate a high-quality JPEG.
    8… Still within Affinity, scale and export newly edited candidate. This is the Jpeg image that will be used in some final product, such as a book, or slideshow, etc.

If I use a digital camera, then I rely upon an older version of CaptureOne (v. 20?) for editing, finishing, etc. I do not rely upon CaptureOne’s Metadata editing, preferring PhotoMechanic.

I suspect that most people in this Forum have a digital workflow, and, in that case perhaps having an all-in-one suite of tools makes more sense.

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I would make the argument that for the most part, DXO/Filmpack already has the Nik collection functionalities integrated. Let me explain my reasoning:

  • Silver Efex: covered by a combo of Photolab and Filmpack
  • Color Efex: covered by a combo of Photolab and Filmpack
  • Analog Efex: covered by Filmpack
  • Viveza: covered by Photolab
  • HDR Efex: a bit of a tough one. As far as I know DXO can’t combine images to make a HDR image, but I am not sure how many people really use HDR anymore. It was trendy at one time.
  • Dfine: legacy. Denoising is done much much better with the DeepPrime variants.
  • Nik Sharpening: covered in Photolab. In fact, I rarely do any sharpening anymore since I have been using the DeepPrime variants.

I also find the tiff workflow from Photolab quite clunky. I primarily use ACDSee as my photo editor, but always run my images through Photolab first for denoising and optical corrections, and sometimes for Viewpoint and other stuff that Photolab does better. I was a huge fan of using Nik Collection as a plug-in with ACDSee, but Nik Collection no longer works with ACDSee, so I investigated alternatives. I am very happy that Filmpak does everything I need, and can be used as a photoshop plugin as well in ACDSee. For those who use DXO as their primary photo editor, the benefit of Filmpack being baked into Photolab is huge.

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[quote=“platypus, post:7, topic:40316, full:true”]
To Nik or Not to Nik, that is the question.

Imo, the best way for you to find out if you need it is to test it with the free trial.

I’d agree here, but before downloading the trial pack, check out videos on YouTube to see what the different tools do and whether they’re what you’re looking for. They’re not really tools that can be mastered just by trial and error, imho.

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Indeed. Moreover, the Nik Collection tends to be difficult to remove, unless one uses DxO’s cleanup tool available here:

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no software are, every software have a different approach.
Nik has its perk, you can use as many filters as you want, but changing the order will alter the result.

at the end of the day, Nik collection is a tool box of plugin, filmpack is a film emulation preset plugin, viewpoint is a geometry plugin, pureraw is a do it all for me plugin. they are all extra tools at extra cost for people that either want or need them.

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So you pretty much agree with me? See if the software is something that can be useful to the user by understanding how it’s used before downloading.

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always try before you buy, that goes for any software.
i know many that use adobe combined with pureraw or on1 with pureraw cause they don’t want PL and there’s more with other software that PL don’t offer like stacking, pano, hdr, creative vignette (sorry the one in PL is really archaic even with FP) and even resizing images, that is just to name those.