The newest design allows users to easily identify and access their favorite recipes. Nik Collection 4 has been updated to provide a better user experience with controls that look and feel more akin to Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. These have a lot of our reviews on individual film emulsions. You can see our guides to Lomography, Cinestill, and Kodak films. If you’re curious, we’ve reviewed a ton of film emulsions. As such, this may be more of a marketing ploy than an actual representation of the most realistic film looks. It sounded more like marketing fluff, which we’re trained to see though. Our Editor in Chief pressed DXO on this in a press demo, but they weren’t able to provide a clear answer. The same can be said for Ilford and Fuji and the various developers. For example, Kodak Tri-X can look different with Rodinal vs. They do not indicate what factors were considered when they produced the film grain for use within the plug-in when they made this claim. DxO has spent a significant amount of time researching and developing these various grains and emulsions. The plug-in now includes 39 film grains that Nik claims to produce images that look more like analog film than ever before.
It boasts 58 black and white presets and 28 black and white film types. You can quickly undo changes by clicking on previous versions – this means your HDR images are essentially non-destructible.What’s New in Nik Collection 4? Silver Efex Pro 3ĭxO’s newest Silver Efex Pro 3 is hands-down the top selling point of this release. There is also a history tab that shows each change you have made to the image. After that, the HDR plugin itself appears to operate quickly and without delay. It isn’t the fastest we have used and the initial transition between DxO Photo Lab and HDR Efex Pro is a little slow.
The HDR process itself is extremely easy to use – even if you don’t have experience with editing software, you can quickly understand how the process works.Ĭoncerning performance, the program works OK. It soon became apparent, however, that there is a Nik Collection button that allows you to access each of the Nik Collection plugins.
At first, we didn’t realize that HDR Efex Pro opened via DxO photo lab – this was a little confusing and we spent some time trying to find how to actually open the HDR software. Ease of Useįor the most part, this program is easy to use.
The software also looks fantastic and has a clean, modern design. That is essentially it – the workspace is uncluttered, and you can easily find and use the different tools. The right pane contains the basic image editing tools. In the center is an image preview – this can be split into different views including a before and after preview. The left pane contains image presets – it is split into categories and provides thumbnails of the different effects. The initial HDR creation process is a step-by-step procedure that you can’t get wrong.įurthermore, the main editing screen is simple and split into three main panes. The basic layout of this program is extremely simple. When creating this HDR Efex Pro review, we noticed that its basic features are a little sparse – it is not as detailed and in-depth as other HDR software like ON1 HDR, or Aurora HDR. This is not an intense program – 4GB of RAM is quite minimal and any basic computer should be able to run this program smoothly. Processor – Intel Core 2 or AMD Athlon or higher.System Requirements & Basic Featuresįirst, let’s look at the basic requirements and features of HDR Efex Pro: System Requirements Commissions do not affect our evaluations. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn a commission at no cost to you.