You can use them as external editors within any program that offers an external editor feature and you can even launch them directly as standalone programs. You can also launch the Nik plug-ins from within DxO PhotoLab 4, DxO's flagship photo editing/raw processing/image enhancement tool. It's like an automated series of actions and opens up even more possibilities – although at this stage there are just ten Meta Presets included and you can't currently create your own.

Nik Collection 4 adds a Meta Preset feature which can combine results from two or more Nik plug-ins. With this, you can not only launch each plug-in directly, but you can choose a processing preset too. If you open images in Photoshop you can launch them from here too – though DxO installs its own Nik Collection Selective Tool Panel which offers a lot more control. If you use Lightroom Classic as your digital hub, all eight can be used as plug-ins. You can fit these plug-ins into your workflow in a variety of ways. These do now seem somewhat past their sell-by date, as you would probably carry out these jobs in raw processing software these days.

Perspective Efex fixes converging verticals and other perspective issues, while Viveza offers powerful global and local color adjustments – like dodging and burning for color images rather than black and white.īringing up the rear are Dfine and Sharpener Pro, which offer noise reduction and creative/output sharpening respectively.

Perspective Efex and Viveza are more for image correction and enhancement. (Image credit: Rod Lawton/Digital Camera World) (opens in new tab)ĭxO Nik Collection 4 consists of eight plug-ins, some of which are for creative image effects and some for more everyday image corrections and enhancements.Īnalog Efex Pro, Color Efex Pro, HDR Efex Pro and Silver Efex Pro are the chief 'creative' plug-ins, offering analog film and darkroom effects, a myriad of different photo treatments, filters and adjustments, HDR merging and tonemapping tools and powerful black and white image editing and conversions respectively. DxO Nik Collection 4 brings major improvements to Silver Efex Pro (shown here) and Viveza, but there are workflow improvements across the board for Adobe users too.

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