Full Nik Software Suite for $127 Using Coupon Code "MU-43"

in the less than 24 hours I've been using them, it is easily the single greatest upgrade to my photography ever. Way more important than a camera body upgrade for sure. It can take a boring snapshot and imbue it with character. Now I can only imagine what might happen if I had a great photo to start with.

Be sure to check out Nik's tutorials, while some of them are a bit lame [use this plugin and that] others tell you how to smoothly do your own images from scratch, after a couple you'll be tooling along like a pro :) I had just gotten this suite of software for our May photochallenge. Wow that was almost a year ago.
 
Don't sleep on Viveza. To me it's the most useful one of them all...

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I've been using Viveza too for the past couple of weeks. It's very powerful and quite intuitive to use. I believe that Photoshop does similar things - I just haven't got time to learn Photoshop. The only problem I'm finding with all of these tools is that I waste even more hours than is sensible.....................
 
James, this is a plug-in that works with Lightroom. Here's a video that shows what Viveza does. Nothing less than giving you complete control over color and light in your photographs (which is all they are made of anyways!)

Now experienced PPers may say that they can do everything in Photoshop or Lightroom with these plug-ins, but it certainly is a LOT easier.

I'm crossposting a comment here that I made on another forum...

Silver Efex gets the most buzz, but for me the killer app is Viveza. It's practically eliminated any need for layer masking, etc.

For example, you can drop a U-point on someone's skin and adjust the hue/saturation without affecting (or minimally affecting) the surrounding background. Makes it easy to fix skintones of one or more people in mixed lighting where only some of the people are white balanced appropriately. Or you can drop a U point in the sky and darken that without masking out the mountains on the horizon. Add fill light to a face without affecting the surrounding parts of the photo. Etc etc.

Also, Dfine is the only noise reduction app I know that can effectively remove banding. The type of banding sometimes seen with the GH1 or the new Leica M (type 240) is easy to remove with Dfine and as far as I know impossible to remove without it.
 
Okay, sorry I was at work and no time to check the board for awhile. Next question: is the downloaded file a .exe file? It should be and if it isn't that's part of the problem.

Second, in the past I've had problems with virus and/or "filtering" software (like for "safe browsing") that sees a pattern in the download and alters or removes it. If you have a .exe file and it won't execute, then try doing a brief disabling or if you can download the file on another system and put it on flash drive or whatever to move it to the target system.

I'll try to be more quick in replies, lol.[/QUOTE

John, My first problem was the downloaded file ended in win_fill.I needed to add the .exe to it.Then I had to download the latest version of Lightroom.
Now it works fine.
 
Okay, sorry I was at work and no time to check the board for awhile. Next question: is the downloaded file a .exe file? It should be and if it isn't that's part of the problem.

Second, in the past I've had problems with virus and/or "filtering" software (like for "safe browsing") that sees a pattern in the download and alters or removes it. If you have a .exe file and it won't execute, then try doing a brief disabling or if you can download the file on another system and put it on flash drive or whatever to move it to the target system.

I'll try to be more quick in replies, lol.

John, My first problem was the downloaded file ended in win_fill.I needed to add the .exe to it.Then I had to download the latest version of Lightroom.
Now it works fine.

Wow, that was quite a journey! Glad you got there.

I got confused when I went to use the plug-ins in Lightroom and I thought all I had was the HDR one. That one appears in the "Export" dialog and the other ones appear in the "Edit In" dialog and I didn't notice that at first. RTFM is advice I should occasionally embrace, lol.
 
A couple of months ago I got an email from Nik which had hidden text saying I could have a free copy of HDR Efex Pro (it was on the "alt" tag for an image in the email). I queried this with them (expecting a polite brush-off) and they said "it was a mistake but yes you can have it for free". Today I got an email from Nik/Google saying that as a long-standing customer I could have the full package of 6 plugins for free!! As I already have the Topaz Adjust and B&W Effects programs I shall be interested to see the difference. I didn't think much of the Nik HDR package but I know people rave about Silver Efex and Viveza.
 
A couple of months ago I got an email from Nik which had hidden text saying I could have a free copy of HDR Efex Pro (it was on the "alt" tag for an image in the email). I queried this with them (expecting a polite brush-off) and they said "it was a mistake but yes you can have it for free". Today I got an email from Nik/Google saying that as a long-standing customer I could have the full package of 6 plugins for free!! As I already have the Topaz Adjust and B&W Effects programs I shall be interested to see the difference. I didn't think much of the Nik HDR package but I know people rave about Silver Efex and Viveza.

Martin, I'm starting to like Viveza with the "U Point" auto masking -- can be useful. I have done some experiments with the HDR Efex and I don't like it so far. LR Enfuse for my stuff works much better so far to get photo-realistic looks -- but I recognize I've not used it enough to make a judgement.

Still, LR-Enfuse won me over day one and this just doesn't reproduce the look and does some funny color shifts for some reason that I don't see with the Enfuse program.

I'll be trying Silver Efex, Dfine (not better than Topaz DeNoise, but I like the U-Point selectivity), and Sharpener Pro may be useful also.
 
WOW! Thanks for this. I usually don't read my "junk" email, but after reading this I found it in the trash. As a previous owner of NIK software, I get everything gratis!
 
Also, Dfine is the only noise reduction app I know that can effectively remove banding. The type of banding sometimes seen with the GH1 or the new Leica M (type 240) is easy to remove with Dfine and as far as I know impossible to remove without it.

It does, but still with limitations. Removal of banding is directly linked to removal of noise, so if you want all the banding gone (a good thing) you need to remove all of the noise (not so good thing). I almost always click the "reduce" tab and throttle back the level of noise reduction in Dfine so that it doesn't smear textures.
 
It does, but still with limitations. Removal of banding is directly linked to removal of noise, so if you want all the banding gone (a good thing) you need to remove all of the noise (not so good thing). I almost always click the "reduce" tab and throttle back the level of noise reduction in Dfine so that it doesn't smear textures.

I've found that with the noise reduction disabled, the debanding still works very well and doesn't noticeably change the noise. Have you tried running debanding with noise reduction set to "0"?

See this thread for examples: Nik Dfine banding removal - Micro Four Thirds User Forum
 
If you have a ton of banding, both vertical and horizontal, it can help to run it more than once and then address the resulting halos as a separate problem which tends to be easier to fix in Photoshop than the banding itself. In 2 years of processing GH1 files, I probably came across the need to do this on one or two occasions, total.
 
James, this is a plug-in that works with Lightroom. Here's a video that shows what Viveza does. Nothing less than giving you complete control over color and light in your photographs (which is all they are made of anyways!)

Now experienced PPers may say that they can do everything in Photoshop or Lightroom with these plug-ins, but it certainly is a LOT easier.

Thanks very much for that clip, I finally got around to watching it (been real busy last couple of days). I was going to say, it looks like you can do the same things in Lightroom, on the other hand it's the 'control point' feature he talks about that allows more control over which areas of the photo you want to edit. Hmm.... that would be very convenient indeed.....


I'm crossposting a comment here that I made on another forum...

Silver Efex gets the most buzz, but for me the killer app is Viveza. It's practically eliminated any need for layer masking, etc.

For example, you can drop a U-point on someone's skin and adjust the hue/saturation without affecting (or minimally affecting) the surrounding background. Makes it easy to fix skintones of one or more people in mixed lighting where only some of the people are white balanced appropriately. Or you can drop a U point in the sky and darken that without masking out the mountains on the horizon. Add fill light to a face without affecting the surrounding parts of the photo. Etc etc.

Also, Dfine is the only noise reduction app I know that can effectively remove banding. The type of banding sometimes seen with the GH1 or the new Leica M (type 240) is easy to remove with Dfine and as far as I know impossible to remove without it.

Hmm... thanks very much for that ..... I am very tempted to buy that set .....

Those u-points or control points, aren't they the same as that brush feature in Lightroom in the top right hand corner in the Develop module though?
 
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