A few years back, Nik Collection was sold for over US$450.00 until Google bought them and they sold the plugins for I believe US$150.00. This year, Google decided to make it available for FREE. Click here to download your free copy for MAC or Windows. Please note, in order to use Nik you need to have either Photoshop or Lightroom as these are plugins and not stand alone applications.
- Analog Efex Pro
- Color Efex Pro
- Silver Efex Pro
- Viveza
- HDR Efex Pro
- Sharpener Pro
- Dfine
Today I want to give a short overview of one of my favorite plugins, Analog Efex Pro. This works best for the numerous vintage photos I shot lately.
Here is the interior of a vintage Woody right out of the camera:
Load your image into Photoshop or Lightroom and select the Analog Efex Pro application. You will see a number of presets that you can select from or you can create your own. I don’t go into details on how to use all the options got get your look and feel in this blog as it is just to give you some ideas.
As you can see on the image above, there are some areas you may want to highlight or enhance. Analog Efex Pro offers so called ‘Control Points’ – As you can see from the above image, the clock and the odometer are not enhanced, especially the odometer has some reflections that doesn’t show the details. By adding ‘control Points on these two areas, you can enhance these 2 areas to achieve the results you desire:
There are other options you can use, such as scratches, change the saturation, details and brightness of the entire image. Below is the end result of this image:
If you look at the images side-by-side, you can see the difference:
