Customer Reviews

Nik Software Complete Collection - Professional Photographic Tools for Photoshop, Lightroom, and Aperture

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is an excellent plug-in suite for PS.

I've used it for 6 months now, and it has improved the quality of the photos and really cut down the time spent processing them.

- Viveza: This is the most awesome app. in the suite. I run pretty much every photo through viveza, even those who looks great to begin with. Playing with to control points and making localized color corrections makes it easy and fast to improve the overall quality of the photograph, as well as making certain elements of the photo to pop out.

- Color Efex: Nice piece of software, but not as useful as viveza, dfine or Sharpener. The filters are easy to apply and adjust, both globally and localized. The quality of the filters is great, and makes the process og creating certain effects fast, easy and fun. You can get in minutes the same effects you would spend hours trying to do in PS. But just like with other PS filters and effects plug-ins, it should be used with care. Overuse will ruin the photos.

- Silver Efex: Nice black&white conversion software. Like Color Efex, not the most useful software, but it does B&W conversion extremely well. The localized adjustments are great, and gives me much more flexibility than the channel mixer in lightroom and PS.

- Dfine: This is actually the best Noise reduction software I've tried( I've used Noise Ninja and Neat Image before). As with the other apps in the suite, the localized adjustments makes the work so easy and renders such excellent results, that I can't see myself using other programs anytime soon.

- Sharpener: It's a very good sharpening tool, and gives you more flexibility and power than any sharpening method in PS.

The price of the suite is steep, but the quality is unmatched by any other plug-in suite out there, and all the apps in the suite are easy to use, intuitive, fast and renders excellent quality.

I highly recommend this to anyone who like to work with their photos and explore more creative photo enhancement, without spending a lot of time with each photo. I also recommend it to anyone who makes money from their photos, and want to work more efficiently.

If you are like me, you were probably drawn to color Efex Pro and Silver Efex Pro - and decided to bite the bullet and buy the entire package for pretty much the same price as the two programs. But having owned the package for nearly 2 years (and Nik programs for longer than that), I am becoming increasingly frustrated with the product and with Nik's customer service. Honestly, this is a program that is much better in theory than in use. Mostly because it is a huge time sink and far too laborious to have to use each part of each program, opening and closing them separately, just to get an image processed.

I've written separate reviews of Color Efex Pro and Silver Efex Pro - check those to get an idea of what I think of the those programs' features. The good news is that, though very buggy in their early incarnations, are now more robust and stable. They do provide useful and pleasing effects, and unlike many plugins or presets, do a professional job in enhancing your images. I think that's why many people (especially those who don't know PS or LR well) really like the programs. I don't use Viveza or Sharpen at all. Define works well about 50-50 for me and was happy when LR3 came out with top notch noise removal.

And therein lies the problem: this is a program that was created in the era of Photoshop but is now fastly becoming redundant with the advent of Lightroom. Noise and sharpening in LR is not only superior and faster - but it is also non destructive and gives better masking. What takes a good 20 minutes to do a very basic and simple workflow in the Nik suite - only takes 1-2 minutes in Lightroom. Nik software was fine several years ago, in the days when you had to spend a lot of time in Photoshop anyway, so you might as well use a plugin to make your images pretty. But especially in the last two years, workflow time can go from 6-7 hours to under an hour by using Lightroom controls only (even using Nik for LR is time consuming). And so my Nik products, despite my paying a premium for them (ouch), don't get used much except for an occasional 'special treatment' image. Even B&Ws, for me, are coming out looking much better in LR thanks to the ability to manipulate 8 channels in LR (though I love the 'Structure' feature in SilverEfex Pro, it's not worth the extra 10 minutes or more per picture to use it and LR's clarity brush does nearly the same job).

What Nik's programs do are good (with the exception of Define, which is only 50-50 useful for me when I used it before LR 3). But they are also incredibly expensive. When you get a suite of 5 programs, you pay a large upgrade fee for EACH PROGRAM - making the cumulative upgrades cost more than the full price of the suite - which is insane. It's like a Ponzi scheme - you'll end up paying nearly 2-3x the original purchase price of the program in just a couple of years in order to upgrade and stay current. That, more than any other reason, is why you don't want to buy the suite. I've stopped upgrading as a result - I just don't feel Nik respects its customers at all.

Which leads to my final thoughts: over the years I've had to deal with their customer service several times. And they've been very rude or unresponsive each time. An example was a recent request for the 'special' upgrade price on SilverEfex 2 that their website wouldn't give me in the cart (the cart would only give me the full 'non upgrade' version and not the clearly advertised upgrade price). I had to email 3 times (and I was purchasing their products, you'd think they'd want my money), and on the third time they gave me a discount code and a note written very rudely that they were doing me a huge favor with the discount code. The irony? The code still didn't give me the full upgrade price discount and so I would have had to pay full nearly the full new price and not the upgrade special ($40 extra with their 'discount code') for suite owners.

So in all, with Lightroom getting better and better, I've come to realize that for me, it was better to spend my money learning how to use LR wisely ($30 at Lynda.com is a STEAL!) rather than continuing to purchase Nik products. I've shaved hours and hours off my workflow and can actually enjoy time with my family again. Nor have I used Viveza or sharpening - it's far too time consuming to bring up each program and spend an hour on just one image (and if you do spend that much time on an image, it should be from you knowing Photoshop and layers to bring out an image's best points anyway).

If you've spent any money on digital photography, you know how quickly the money adds up. I consider myself an intermediate amateur photographer, and this software not only significantly cuts down on the time spent editing my favorite shots, it drastically improves the results. Although I haven't quite gotten a handle on sharpening my photos, every other piece of software was incredibly useful right out of the box.

If you have a vision for how you want the photo to turn out, these tools can easily and simply help you get there. If you aren't sure what would make a photo work, the color pro filters and the silver fx filter can give you dozens of directions to go in. The U-point selection controls blow photoshop away. With reduced effort, I'm turning "photos" in "pieces". It's inspired me to look at old pictures I could never get quite right with photoshop, and helped me produce great results with them! Bottom line for me--well worth the price of a quality lens, at a fraction of the cost!

absolutely amazing in every way. i am a professional child and family photographer, and this is an editing dream! noise reduction, amazing BW effects, as well as fast modern filtering effects- it really is amazing. well worth it- cut my editing time in half! you wont regret it!
stefanie
[...]

I cannot stress strongly enough how disappointed I am with this package and NIK Software. The out of box experience is horrendous. Technical support is non existent. All, no exaggeration, ALL of the applications provided in the box were outdated and it was necessary to download every single one of them from the web. In fact, there is no point in even opening the box other than to get the product keys. Which, as described below, don't always work. None, again no exaggeration, NONE of the applications installed properly into Lightroom 3.3 or Adobe Bridge CS3/4/or 5.

I cannot believe there are positive reviews for this product. I highly suspect these were seeded by NIK, not people who actually bought this. Caveat Emptor (BUYER BEWARE), give this one a miss. This would not be worth installing if they paid you to do it.

More details:

I attempted to install this on a Windows 7 machine with administrator access. The software did not install properly. It failed to install into Lightroom 3.3 or Adobe Bridge CS3/4 or 5.

The software activation process failed for Viveza 2. First, I was presented with a message that said I entered the wrong product key. Fine, I re-entered it and triple checked it then picked the Activate button. The next message presented stated that I was attempting to use more activations than I was allowed. I hadn't used even a single activation yet. I had not installed it on any other computers. I searched the tech support documentation and did as directed, uninstall/reinstall and tried again. No joy.

I contacted NIK tech support via email for all of this. With the exception of an automated, we received your tech support request email, they were totally unresponsive. It appears they don't respond except during banker's hours and not until 3 days have passed. This is totally unacceptable for any software application to be used in a professional environment. To say the least. Good luck finding that out before you hand over your hard earned cash.

I started examining the last publish date of some of the applications. Some of the stuff on the CD is as old as 2007. So, I doubt that there is a staff of programmers actually keeping these products up to date.

Finally, while the applications did install into Photoshop CS5, the pop up menu does not dock with the menu system in CS5. So you have this extra menu hanging out there in the way all the time. Also, there are collapsible sections within this menu. If you collapse them, the next time you open Photoshop all of the sections are expanded again. Making it a chore to find the tool you want to use. There does not appear to be a way to correct either of these annoying behaviors.

I am professional photographer and use this NIK software package for all of my portraits and many of my other photographs. Recently I changed computers to Windows 7 64 bit Operating system. The NIK support team did everything to make this transition go well.
The online training that NIK provides it great too. Well worth the time.

Download the free-trial from the Nik site first...then you will be hooked. Wait till Amazon sells this with the Viveza 2 upgrade.

Nik is horrendous. First they take about nine months to create upgrades that are 64-bit compatible. Then they create it so that all your presets you created in v. 1 are not compatible in v. 2. I'm referring to Silver Efex Pro 2. On top of that, you cannot keep both versions (despite their customer service lying to me saying, oh sure).

So, I have all these photos using v. 1 presets on smart filter layers. Useless. If I upgrade to v. 2, I can't go back and edit them (you have to delete v. 1 plug-in). And I can't take those presets and upgrade them to v. 2 presets. I WILL HAVE TO GO BACK AND MANUALLY REDO ALL MY PHOTOS!!! What happens after the next upgrade? Will I have to start over again? This is not professional. Who is running the place? The owner's son? His buddy? A brown noser who back-stabbed his/her way to the top?

There are other options out there. Time to move on.

I liked everything about this software but the price! Seems very expensive for what you get. Works good with XP and PS CS4 running on 3G of ram!

I love this software collection and use it daily with Photoshop. All the settings for each tool the user can adjust to their preferences and come up with a lot of wonderful effects.