Customer Reviews

The Official Nik Software Image Enhancement Guide: The Photographer's Resource for Professional Workflow Techniques

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

 

 

This book is truly awful. First of all, it is unreadable. Almost every illustration is a full screen screen-shot reproduced at 4 1/4" x 3 1/4", two on a page, with plenty of white space. The Nik screens use light gray text on a dark gray background, which is fine on the screen, because it doesn't corrupt your color vision, but it is totally unreadable when printed at such a small size in the book.

The text itself is bad. It is so full of typographical and grammatical errors that it is jarring to read. For instance, on page 106, what does "In steps the Reflector effects, and their ability to bring back an image." mean? Is there a verb in there that I missed? Is "reflector" a proper noun?

If the copy were redeeming, the book might be worth the struggle; but it isn't. I was hoping for a reference book that would help me figure out what the various filters do and how to use them. Instead, the book is a random walk through the filters that the author particularly likes, with a description of how he would apply them to specific images. Color Efex Pro contains 52 filters, with variations on many of the filters. The book covers fewer than 20 filters.

These comments apply only to Color Efex Pro, which is the only product that I own and the only part of the book that I slogged through. By the way, Color Efex Pro is a great program, even though it is not well documented. I bought this book to try to fill that void.

The author too frequently breezes through some of his applications of the Nik filters. In his attempt to cover all the filters and give examples of the use of many of them, he makes his discussion of the applications too brief.

Although he often explains what you're seeing in the accompanying images, the small size of the images makes it difficult to read some of the parameters he's set in the screenshots. There are times when he refers to what are supposed to be obvious parameter differences between screenshots, expecting you to read them from the screenshots, but the size and colors used make it impossible to do so. Both Josh and the publisher should have realized that the light gray-on-gray and white lettering-on-gray UI that Nik insists on using do not improve readability on the scales used in the book.

Very disappointed with this. No real information and so many errors, I imagine it wasn't reviewed. Would have returned it had I not already removed the CD.

I was looking forward to getting this book as I use Nik products all the time.
However, the CD that came with the book does not work in my Apple computer.
In addition, as others have noted, the images of computer screens are small and dark making them almost impossible to read.
Unless the publisher creates a new edition that corrects these defects, I would not recommend this book.

I have to agree with the other one star reviews. I tried to get through this book but it has very little to do with images other than the samples presented. I've been using photographic software since Photoshop 2 and am currently using Aperture 2 and the entire Nik software collection plug in's. This book covers none of the Aperture plug in functionality and marginally covers the Photoshop version. Nik software's website and tutorials while sometimes tedious do a much better job and for a lot less money. The spelling and grammar errors are painful as well. This one is going back.

Don't waste your time or money. You'll get more from NIK's website and it will be spelled correctly.
Illustrations OK, coverage (filters for example) spotty and incomplete. Personally, I got nothing from it at all.
Want to buy a used copy?

The illustrations in this book are unusable. I received a PDF of one chapter updated, and that is readable on the computer. The text refers constantly to the illustrations, which are blurry, grey, too small and all around unreadable.

I have bought into Nik software to a very big degree. The stuff is killer as it enables great power in improving my shots.

As I accumulated more of the Nik modules, I wanted something to get me "dangerous" quicker than trial and error. This is particularly true for the Color Efex Pro module as there are so many different filters in that package.

I searched Amazon for a book on that module and this book popped up. In checking it out, I read several very negative reviews for this book and I looked elsewhere. Well, I couldn't find another source so I ordered this book.

In reality, this book is about ALL of the Nik modules and how to configure your workflow for better results and do so in less time.

I totall agree with some of the negative reviews: In particular, the screen shots are way too small. To see the various settings in the screen shots you have to look quite hard to make them out.

I really can't complain about the writing in 99% of the text. Is anything perfect?

The portion on Sharpener Pro is way out of date and 75% useless.

The book comes with a CD that contains pictures used in the book. This is really cool as you can "tutorialize" the book and get a better idea of what he did by following along in the software.

BUT, none of the picture are very big (600 X 300'ish) is max. Many of the pictures are almost postage stamp size and this makes using them tedious at best. Hey Josh, why don't you splurge and get the pictures with enough size to make using them a better experience?

Other than that, I have nothing other than good things to write about.

Other reviewers have commented on the poor photographs and awkward text. No need to repeat that.

Over and above that, this book is far from comprehensive. It covers a few capabilities and the examples show how to manipulate photos to the author's taste. The author's taste is as bad as the rest of the book. I thought the photos looked better before they were "improved."

That is not to say anything against the Nik software itself. I own the complete set and think that it is excellent. You can learn much more about the software's capabilities from Nik's free on-line tutorials than from this book.

The book doesn't cover any of Nik's plugins in detail; the author gives a few examples of how he would use the filters, but nothing else. The images contained in the cd are very small and you can't work with them comfortably. Plugins are only shown in Photoshop but not in Aperture. I'm very disappointed with this book. Nik seminars online are far more useful than this book.