

#GOOGLE NIK COLLECTION COLOR EFEX PRO 4 FREE#
It provides a great variety of photo editing services such as copying the look of old cameras and films, image retouching and correction, darkroom retouching, color adjustment and tonality, HDR, noise reduction and photo sharpening.Įven though it’s free now, Nik Collection is a really a very powerful tool for your Post Photography Photo Editing needs. This collection has 7 desktop add-ons that you can use as a standalone or as an plugin with Adobe Lightroom. Google said, “Photo enthusiasts all over the world use the Nik Collection to get the best out of their images every day.” They further added, “As we continue to focus our long-term investments in building incredible photo editing tools for mobile, including Google Photos and Snapseed, we’ve decided to make the Nik Collection desktop suite available for free, so that now anyone can use it.” But now the big news is, this collection is completely free – no catch, no strings attached. So rather than go through each of the 22 images in turn, I’m just going to click the ‘Save All’ button in the bottom right corner of the Color Efex Pro window.Earlier Nik Collection was originally valued at around $500, and later sold at the lowest price of $150 by Google. OK, so that’s the first image adjusted, so I’ll click the Next button…Ĭolor Efex Pro now loads the next image – and it inherits the same settings used for the first one, so actually I don’t need to do anything at all. Now there is a ‘Previous’ button (greyed out because I’m looking at the first image), a ‘Next’ button and, in between, it says ‘1 of 22 images’ – that’s the number of images I sent to Color Efex Pro from Aperture. You have to look at the bottom of the window, though, to see what’s different. I’ve chosen the effect I want (‘Old Photo Cool’) from the Presets sidebar. Instead of preparing one image for editing, Aperture now prepares all the images I’ve selected and then sends them to Color Efex Pro… 02 Choose your effectĪt first sight, everything looks normal in the Color Efex Pro window. I’ve selected all the images I want to edit, right-clicked one of them (it doesn’t matter which) and I’ve chosen Color Efex Pro from Aperture’s plug-in menu. This comes as a set of plug-ins for Photoshop, Lightroom and Aperture.

At the moment they’re regular JPEGs, but I think they’ll look good with a cool-toned old photo effect I’ve created in Color Efex Pro, which is part of the Google Nik Collection.

I’ve opened a project containing some architectural shots I took recently around the streets of Bath. I’m going to launch it from within Aperture because there are some cataloguing features in Aperture which are really useful at the end of this walkthrough, but you could just as easily work from Lightroom instead. It’s easily overlooked, but breathtakingly simple, and here’s how it works. That’s where the batch processing option in the Nik Collection is so useful. Wouldn’t it be better to put the effects you like already to some constructive use, rather than continually roaming your effects library for others? If you’re anything like me, you spend a lot of time dabbling with one special effect, moving on to another image, trying another effect and keep on experimenting without a specific aim in mind.
