When I first bought PL1, I looked through the tools that were provided and found the ideal purchase was the PL+FP+VP Elite bundle. It cost what it cost and has been worth every cent.
From an ease of use point of view, all I do is open PL and everything is there (apart from print sharpening and resizing)
I really don’t like Nik because I would have to keep on saving intermediate TIFF files each time I change tool.
I guess, if you don’t like DxO’s pricing structure, not to be too blunt, maybe you need to look for another tool?
you do all in PL, so yes there’s no point for you to look for other software. Nik was never meant for PL users, even though DxO bought Nik Collection, it’s not integrated like FP and VP within PL, would that be nice? yes, but it’s not the case, it’s like starting with PureRAW then back into PL to finish your work.
Nik is for AP, Ps, Lr, C1, ON1 etc… any software that use plugins. like PureRAW is for people that doesn’t use PL. The one thing with Nik6 is you have FP and VP all together, was a win win, then of course they removed VP from Nik 7 and same with Nik 8.
why DxO doesn’t make Nik part of PL without the need of .tiff file to go back and forth, I honestly thought the next update PL8 or Nik 8 would had been this.
“30 years of innovation and creativity,” as DxO puts it, have led to a large body of software code (Nik Collection 8) that is aimed at modifying RGB images. All of this code would have to be re-written to work with images still represented by sensor data, and not images at all (yet).
And why would DxO do a re-write of software so it can deal with images still represented as sensor data (raw photos), when that has largely already been done and … drum roll … been released as nine versions of DxO PhotoLab?
I’m quite sure that PhotoLab’s internal work buffer is RGB once it has loaded and demosaiced the raw sensor data. I think DeepPRIME* denoising is the only thing that is working directly on sensor data, anything that comes after is RGB.
Nik would “just” have to be modified to understand and work directly on a PhotoLab provided buffer in the module chain instead of on an intermediate fully rendered copy. Depending on Nik’s internal code design, that could be trivial to implement or it could be nearly impossible without a full rewrite.
I love it when a member of a user forum speculates on how trivial a change to their software might be for the developers to make.
But my point is that DxO have already incorporated all of the features from the Nik Collection into PhotoLab that they have wanted to use. And you get them by buying and using PhotoLab, FilmPack, and ViewPoint.
Nik Collection is still around, using intermediate TIFs and JPEGs, for those who want the functionality but with external, non-DxO, editors like Photoshop and Affinity Photo.
But what if DxO does not see the need for a “PL to NIK workflow” any longer? What if they keep Nik around for integration with non-DxO software, as they do with PureRAW?
I have never needed a PL to Nik workflow. As long as I have FilmPack and ViewPoint embedded in PL, that’s all I’ve ever needed, apart from Topaz Photo AI for preprint sharpening and enlargement.
How convenient to leave out the “or it could be nearly impossible without a full rewrite” part of the quote to twist what I wrote to mean something else and then make a snide remark about that.
Yes, thanks for the reminder of that thread - I did vote. Seems like DxO is going the other way though, no PL-integrated RAW, no linear DNG, just TIFFs with instructions as a “nondestructive” workflow.
