The user interfaces of Viveza and Silver Efex have been completely redesigned with a new look that’s more in keeping with other DxO software and provides a much clearer and more modern interface to work with. New user interface for Silver Efex and Viveza You can also create your own custom presets and import presets made by other people, so there’s plenty of room to customise Viveza to your requirements. The presets can be used as a starting point for adjusting effects manually or you can begin with the default Neutral preset that leaves the image untouched for full manual editing.

When you consider the number of presets that are available in other plug-ins within the collection, ten is an extremely small number so it would be most welcome to see more presets added in future updates. Viveza features ten new native presets designed by professional photographers and are mostly one-click corrective or quick fix effects, although there are presets for sharpening eyes and softening skin in portraits. Nik Collection 4 includes eight individual plug-ins covering a range of popular editing tasks and provides easy-to-achieve effects: Define 2 is used for noise reduction Viveza 3 is for adjusting colour and tonality Perspective Efex can be used to adjust lens and perspective distortion HDR Efex Pro 2 allows you to create HDR images from bracketed and single shots Analog Efex Pro 2 offers classic film and camera effects Color Efex Pro 4 provides colour filters and other creative effects Silver Efex Pro 3 offers powerful control over black & white conversions while Sharpener Pro 3 is for sharpening images.

This is one of the most comprehensive plug-in suites ever created, and with frequent updates, it’s easy to see why the Nik Collection is once again growing in functionality and indeed popularity. The Nik Collection 4 by DxO is the latest version of the unwaveringly popular plug-in suite for Photoshop and Lightroom Classic. The Nik Collection by DxO has seen some improvements in recent years, James Abbott takes a look at the latest version to see if it offers enough new features to be a worthy upgrade

Analog efex pro 2