Sometimes, you can see guess how a thing got priced by looking at its raw materials. A gold necklace. A filet mignon. A house.
Other times, the price is harder to assess. What, for example, is the value of software? It’s just an electronic file — lines of code, infinitely duplicatable without incurring any additional expense.
Years ago, I co-wrote a huge, 1300-page book called Mac Secrets.
Each edition came with a CD filled with software. But it wasn’t just
demos and shareware. Instead, I contacted various software companies and
asked them if I could include, on this CD, the full commercial versions of their products — perhaps one version old. For free.
To
my eternal amazement, most of them jumped at the chance. Their thinking
was: “By introducing more people to our recently discontinued 3.0
version, we gain new customers for our current 4.0 version.”
I found it incredible that a software company might charge $300 for a piece of code on September 18 — but then give it away for nothing on September 19. Surely the value of the 3.0 version hadn’t dropped that much overnight.
All
of this came to mind two weeks ago when Nik Software’s Complete
Collection, a suite of seven photo-editing programs that once cost $500,
suddenly became free. That’s right: The same set of
well-reviewed, high-end plug-ins that once cost $500 (and then dropped
to $150 after Google bought company in 2012) just became free.
You can download them right here, for Mac or Windows.
Is ‘free’ good?
The first question is: Why would Google buy a software company and then give away its crown jewels?
“The
Nik Software team has deep and unique image-processing expertise,”
Google told me. “Their technology, coupled with the team’s passion for
photography, accelerated our ongoing efforts at Google to deliver a
great photo experience.” In other words, it wasn’t the software Google
wanted; it was the company’s talent and technology.
The
fact is, though, that when one software company acquires another, the
acquired company’s wares are usually “end-of-lifed” — in other words,
terminated. There’s a very long list of cool apps and programs that are
no longer with us because their companies got swallowed up by bigger
ones: Persuasion, Tweetie, Picnik, Posterous, Sparrow, Summly, Wavii,
Siri (the standalone app), Poster, Meebo, BumpTop 3D, Fridge, SageTV
DVR, Lightbox … the list goes on.
So
it’s remarkable, brave, and possibly expensive for Google to make the
Nik suite available to all, for nothing. It would be simpler to kill off
the Nik plug-ins; instead, the company plans to keep them updated for
compatibility as operating systems and host programs (Photoshop,
Lightroom, and others) evolve.
The second question is: Now that these plug-ins are free, should you download them?
If editing your photos means more to you than just clicking an automatic Fix
button, the answer is yes. The Nik tools are complex, but they bring
amazing editing power to Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, and
Aperture as plug-ins. (You can also run the Nix apps as standalone
programs, with some limitations.) In many cases, you’ll find them to be
more flexible, powerful, and satisfying to use than what Adobe or Apple
provides out of the box.
Get started with the nik collection
You get the software here. The videos here show you how to install it. You can find out how to run the Nik programs as standalone apps — if you don’t own Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, Bridge, or Aperture — here.
And this video gives a concise one-hour lesson in using all six plug-ins. If you need more, this page is full of video tutorials.
Once
you’ve installed the software, you can access them either from your
host program’s menus, or from the floating Nik palette that lists them
all:
What
you’ll soon discover is that there are seven basic Nik plug-ins: Dfine,
Viveza, HDR Efex, Analog Efex, Color Efex, Silver Efex, and Sharpener.
Here’s what they do, one at a time.
Dfine 2.0
Dfine
2.0 reduces “noise” — digital speckles, which commonly degrade photos
in low light or when your camera’s ISO (light sensitivity) setting was
too high.
The problem with most noise-reduction software, of course, is that it basically works by blurring stuff. After all: How is a piece of software supposed to differentiate unwanted mottling of pixels (“noise”) from detail in the image?
Dfine 2.0 offers a solution: You help it out by showing it
which areas to de-noise. A featureless sky, for example, is an easy
one; there’s not much detail that would be ruined by a little blurring.
You
can paint onto the areas you want to de-speckle, you can alter the
entire image, you can specify a range of colors, or you can use Nik’s
famous control points (described below). At any point, you can
use Nik’s cool split-screen effect, which shows you the before and after
(and you can drag the divider line from side to side). See how the
boat’s hull on the left side is “noisier” than the right?
Obviously,
all of this means that you’ll spend more time working on a photo than
you would with your software’s built-in, one-shot noise filter. But
equally obviously, you have far more control, and may therefore be able
to rescue far more pictures.
Viveza 2
This
plug-in does the kinds of things you’d do in almost any photo editor —
even Photos (for Mac or Windows): adjust brightness, contrast,
saturation, shadows, warmth, hue, and “structure” (texture emphasis).
The advantage is that you can use Nik’s split screen, control points, and other tools to apply those effects selectively.
Color Efex Pro 2
Color
Efex Pro is like Instagram for the professional. It offers 55 filters
that affect the look of your photos in dramatic and cool ways.
Thanks
to the gallery of thumbnails, they’re much easier to preview and
understand than wading through the menus in Photoshop or Elements.
You
can apply these filters only to sections of your photo, and you can
adjust their opacity (the strength of their effect). You can combine
them, thereby multiplying the 55 effects into thousands. You can dial up
your own filter combinations and save them to use later — or to share
with other people.
Some
of them simulate certain kinds of old film, or give a nostalgic look to
a photo, or distort its coloration beyond recognition.
It’s worth noting that in Photoshop, any of the plug-ins can be “smart objects” — floating layers that you can re-edit later.
Analog Efex Pro 2
Here
are more filters — this time, designed to simulate the characteristics
of different kinds of photographic film and film cameras. Special
sliders govern dust and scratches, lens vignetting (where the corners
get darker), the amount of film grain, and so on.
HDR Efex Pro 4
Ever hear of HDR? It’s short for high dynamic range photography.
Turns
out that a camera sensor still isn’t as sensitive as your eyeball. The
sensor can’t take in as wide a range of brights to darks. So what canny
photographers do is take several photographs of the identical scene at
different exposures — one too bright, one too dark, one in the middle —
and then use software to combine them to produce a complete spectrum of
lights and darks.
You
probably won’t use HDR Efex Pro often, but it’s there to combine your
multiple exposures when you’re ready. It’s got every kind of tweak, from
realistic to crazy impressionistic or dramatic.
Silver Efex Pro 2
This
one’s expressly for converting color photos to black-and-white ones,
with all of the flexibility, sliders, and control points of the other
Nik plug-ins. Turns out there’s a lot more to converting a color photo
than just subtracting the color, which makes the preview thumbnails
extra useful.
Sharpener Pro 3.0
Sharpening
makes a photo look a little crisper, a bit less blurry. Nik’s
sharpening tool is excellent, thanks to great algorithms and the ability
to sharpen different parts of the photo in different amounts. It’s also
great for blurring parts of photos — a background, for example, to simulate that shallow-depth-of-field look that’s common in pro photography.
To
use it, you specify whether you’ll be showing the image on a screen or
on paper — and, if it’s printed, which paper, ink, and printer you use.
You can even specify how far away people will be standing when they look
at the print, if you know; you can sharpen more if the distance is
greater.
Sharpener Pro 3.0 even includes a fairly amazing Focus tool that can make an out-of-focus element sharper.
Why plug-ins?
Of course, your copy of Photoshop or whatever can also do most of these things. But the Nik plug-ins offer four advantages:
- Tweakable presets. Instead of just dragging sliders around and eyeballing the results, each Nik plugin offers a panel of presets: thumbnails that present a bunch of different possible looks. With one click, you can apply that look to the photo — or you can use one as a starting point, and tweak to taste.
- Control-point masking. Often, you want to apply an effect to only part of an image. In Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, you can carefully select part of an image by dragging around it, by selecting all pixels that match a certain color range, and so on. But the Nik plugins offer a crazy-different alternative: Little control points that you can plant in different parts of the photo. Each control point samples the color you clicked; its draggable spokes control how much change you wan to apply, and how big its “area of influence” is on the photo, as indicated by a circle. Complicated, but useful once you get a hang of it.
- More control. You get more sliders for more functions. And you get a pretty awesome comparison view, where the screen is split between the original and modified image, and you can drag the dividing line back and forth to compare.
- Better algorithms. Some photographers prefer Nik’s skill (at removing noise, sharpening, converting to black-and-white, and so on) to Adobe’s or Apple’s.
Really,
that’s the bottom line. This high-end software, which once cost people
$500, is now yours free. If you use Photoshop, Photoshop Elements,
Lightroom, or Aperture, and you like to edit your photos, you’d be crazy
not to at least explore this Google bounty.
