Multiple Control Points

Sorry for the bother…I am new to Nik Efex. Using multiple control points with a filter i.e. Selective Tones for instance: are the only changes that can be altered individually between control points opacity, luminance and chrominance? Altering highlights, midtones, shadows and blacks will be the same for all the control points. I have viewed some other forum postings but am still not sure. If you wanted to alter tones for three different areas of an image would that mean clicking the selective tones filter plus sign 3 times. Sorry for my confusion. Tim

Hi Tim,

I too am relatively new to the Nik Collection. You are discovering what I have recently discovered. I started playing with Viveza and control points. And then I switched over to Color Efex and discovered that I could bring in the Viveza filters for Color Efex.

BUT, a big difference - with Viveza you can have multiple control points for multiple (different) changes and manipulate those control points (and the change settings) independently. Whereas with Color Efex, each instance of a Viveza filter is for one and only one change, and you can manipulate that change with one or more control points. But the control points, which can be manipulated independently, only affect the same change.
If you need more than one change you must apply the Viveza filter more than once - one time for every different change required. Not sure if I explained that well.

What I am not certain about is how many successive filter instances can be applied, or if there is any limit.

Peter

Hi Peter. Thank you for your response. It is as I expected and BTW you explained things very well. Honestly it seems so counterintuitive. Especially when you compare workflows with something like Lightroom. My guess is that they will address something like this in the future. I have been on the 30 day trial period with it. It has been a learning experience over the course of the 30 days but the functionality regardless of price, I just don’t think at least at this time is for me. Thank you for taking some of your time to respond.

I think the Nik Collection is still very much evolving, and that more change is coming. Not always for the best. Take for example the step backwards for Viveza where version 7, while gaining the new advanced control point features, lost the grouping functionality that was in the previous version. I think DXO will have to reconcile that in some future release. Also notice that the terminology keeps changing, and the consistency between various plugins is not the best. I just wish the price to the consumer was not so high for these incremental steps. This may be the last update I buy. Frankly, I find with the local adjustments and masking in ACR (and so in Lr too) the control points are not keeping up. I really like the ability to intersect and subtract masks in ACR.

Peter

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@Gulfcoast

Please check Nik 7 Color Efex - Gloabl Adjustment filter - control points ... question.

Post #4 explains the different handling of Viveza (= single filter) and Color Efex (= container for several single filters).
One more thing: In ColorEfex you can drag a single filter to a different position in the stack. This changes the effect of the filter in a similar way to a pixel editor with layers.