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Thanks! There’s a lot to discover in the Nik Collection, I’m sure you’ll get great results.

Hi, in principle, you definitely don't want to apply correction settings twice. so selecting the no corrections option would be the right thing to do. Having said that, the technology in PureRAW is identical except for the availability in PureRAW of a newer version of Deep Prime (XD2) which will probably be included in an upgrade of PhotoLab 7. So unless you absolutely need Deep Prime XD2 then you can apply corrections and noise reduction in PhotoLab 7. Where PureRAW really shines is in preprocessing files for Photoshop or any other non DxO processing software.

Yes I have, but quite a few years ago. I know it’s very popular with macro photographers. I always found Photoshop reliable enough for product photography, used to use it for shoes with a focus rail, so setting the focus at the near point and moving the camera until the required depth of field is covered front to back. Slightly different use case. I should have another look at Helicon Focus.

@@chriswrightphotographs Thank you. What I like : it is very easy, and also, in the Pro version you can import a raw file, and you can export as a DNG file.

That is interesting. So the workflow for helicon is shoot, merge, process rather than shoot, process, merge, process some more. Some advantage to that as long as the originals are light enough to merge reliably.

Thank you. I’m impressed with Affinity so far. Glad it was helpful!

@@chriswrightphotographs I bought Affinity 1 for £25 when it was on offer. Can't beat that value. Upgraded to 2 when it came out.

Great deal. They are doing a promotion now at £35 with 6 month trial. The promotion expires before six months though.

Thank you. Great to hear!

Excellent and thanks, hope it goes well. I’ve certainly found Affinity very capable.

Thank you. I agree, I’ve been using Photoshop for more than a decade and first impressions of Affinity are certainly favourable. I’ll explore further in future videos.

Thank you, that's great to hear!

Thanks! PureRAW is one step ahead of PhotoLab in so far as the noise removal algorithms release cycle is concerned. I expect that to be rectified in PhotoLab 8 (that's an opinion, but it seems like a safe bet). Otherwise there is no reason to use PureRAW if you already have PhotoLab. I've always used Lightroom to manage my photos and Photoshop to do layer based processing when I need to (Exposure Blending, Focus Stacking). In those cases it's easier to use PureRAW to preprocess the RAW files and go straight to Photoshop than it is to go via PhotoLab.

I always do the stacking first and process the resulting file. You'll get better results from stacking RAW or DNG or even Tiff files than jpegs as there is more information in these formats. Also the images need to be exactly the same in terms of light and tone, otherwise it can look weird when you stack them. I'll do a full focus stacking video including the processing. Also worth mentioning that some modern cameras will do focus stacking in camera.

@@chriswrightphotographs I can see where you would need the light to match. I was thinking in terms of noise reduction, if the images were shot in low light. DxO is more limited in noise reduction with non-RAW images. You also lose your best sharpening tools. I had been thinking in terms of doing only sharpening and noise reduction on the RAW images, exporting them, and then stacking, cropping, and doing any other adjustments to them. DxO's noise reduction and sharpening tools are so good that I hate to give them up.

@@careylymanjones Good point. Because DxO doesn't support focus stacking, I do this in Photoshop, either manually or by using the scripted option. You can do sharpening post merge, using Nik Sharpener which is very effective, noise is a different matter. I can see there's the possibility of an end to end video and as part of that I'll experiment with running PureRAW on the files pre merge or simply exporting from PhotoLab. The optical corrections only option should work.

@@chriswrightphotographs I've never used NIK Sharpener. Does NIK Sharpener use the DxO optics modules? One of the things I really love about PhotoLab is the way the optics modules make sharpening easier. I almost never have to use Unsharp Mask, since I switched to PhotoLab, at least if there's a module for my lens.

@@careylymanjones I actually prefer Nik Sharpener to Unsharp Mask. It comes in two parts - PreSharpener which shouldn't be used if you've already applied the optics module and Sharpener which is very powerful indeed. It is a great way to draw attention to an element in an image.

Thank you!

Thanks, this was an interesting video to make, it clarified some things for me too. I often find the best way to test my own understanding is to attempt to explain a topic to somebody else!

Thank you! I didn’t record it as I wanted to do a shorter and more accessible video than I have lately. Essentially the second photo is based on the neutral template in hdr Efex. I decide I'd overcooked the first one so adopted a different approach, bypassing the tone mapping as much as possible and omitting the color adjustments. Settings were Tone Compression Tone Compression - minus 46% Method Strength - minus 28% HDR Method Depth Subtle Detail -Soft Drama - Flat Color Saturation -14% Color - Magenta 5% The fine tuning was done back in PhotoLab.

Well I did these edits manually by choice. Silver Efex comes with a large number of templates that can be used as starting points. And, Silver Efex isn’t a RAW editor. In the same way that Photoshop uses Camera Raw or Lightroom for RAW editing, Silver Efex uses PhotoLab or Lightroom. If there is a comparison to be made it would be u-point vs layers or ACR vs PhotoLab.

@@chriswrightphotographs absolutely, you are right. I am just coming from a point where I am having a dilemma. I keep reading everywhere how great silver efex is... but I fail to see what benefit it has over doing edits, similar to what you do in this video, without having to leave Cpature One... I see more the drawback, that is that silver efex only works on TIF or JPEG so I can not just simply go back and do fine adjustments, the usual things one can do with a RAW file... Whereas in Capture One or Lightroom after every step of adjusting things similarly to what silver efex does I can go back and tweak exposure, shadows, higlights color profile, clarity etc etc all things that have a lot more latitude in a RAW file compared to the exported TIF file

@@sigmundklausok, Capture One is an excellent RAW processor, so I appreciate the nature of the dilemma! I would say that if you have clarity on where you want the image to go, and it sounds as though you do, then Silver Efex offers speed. And tif is a lossless format so no danger of losing detail through roundtripping. For anyone not really familiar with Black and white, Silver Efex offers a lot more than short cuts (speed) in terms of the range of presets. Many of them require very little further processing to get professional level results.

Thanks, it is a beautiful country. I have several attempts at that shot. The light has to be just right, the scene changes radically once the sun is higher!

The premium version has enhanced “around me” functionality which is useful. It’s relatively new so there are gaps, I’m on the coast near Gibraltar this week and there are amazing places to photograph, none of which appear on the app yet. I guess that’s part of the fun, finding the gaps, seeing where people have got to and breaking new ground.

Good questions! XD2/XD - I believe XD2 cannot be applied to some types of RAW file. I’ll try and find the reference for that but my understanding is that XD is the fallback option. There is some corrective sharpening applied in the demosaicing process. I haven’t tested this across all the options but I have no reason to believe the newer versions of noise reduction would behave differently. I too use optical corrections only. HighISO sets a threshold below which no sharpening is applied. This is simply to avoid sharpening noise. I don’t know what metric is used to define the threshold. I’ve never used Topaz. I hear such mixed reports about it that I’ve never been tempted to add it. I also resolved to simplify my workflow. Between PureRAW, PhotoLab, Lightroom and Nik I feel I have enough noise reduction!

Absolutely, good point. I always use white background when soft proofing for print. Agree also about the colour rendering, anything that changes the saturation or luminosity levels needs to be done early in the process, I generally go with optical corrections, then cropping, then colour rendering. Leaving these till later in the process almost always incurs rework on the basic settings and colour adjustments.

Thank you!

You’re very kind, it’s a pleasure!

That’s exasperating! I don’t think Nik 6 is available any longer and unless it’s sourced from DxO there would be no support for it. I found it worthwhile to get Viewpoint 4, it’s very good standalone or as a plugin. The current offer is objectively pretty good, next likely window would be Black Friday when most software gets discounted but whether it will match 20% I have no idea.

Does viewpoint add much more than the perspective and other tools in photolab 7 elite. I trialled it a while back and decided I didn't need it. I do have nik 6 and 7 as well. I find I never need to use nik 6 for perspective work. I do sometimes adjust perspective in Affinity which I find more intuitive

@@stefanmarchit’s definitely horses for courses. Viewpoint does deliver more refined functionality for architectural photography, and I have needed that on a few occasions. But certainly not for every photograph.

Glad you like them! Thanks!

Thank you, glad it is useful. That's interesting about Topaz and Sharpen Output, I was impressed with the New Nik Collection update, Sharpen Output is certainly very effective.

Thanks, I use clear view very sparingly as a global correction, I find any setting over about 20 looks "wrong" - to me. That being said, I use it with control points where the control seems more gently calibrated. Agree about Silver Efex, it's the subject of the next video. I hope you're right about the enhanced U Point tech and XD2. Both are impressive.

Quite right and well spotted. The controls on the control point mirror the ones under the control point list. These are local controls but their effect is merged by the diffusion slider at 100% with the area of the picture local to the control point. The output sharpening strength slider I used in the video would apply to the whole picture without diffusion.

The conversion from RAW to Tiff doesn’t make any difference in itself. The only sharpening outside of lens sharpening is the corrective sharpening applied in demosaicing. But the image keeps the settings applied in PL7, so if you apply a preset that includes sharpening then that will be carried across. So always check to make sure the lens sharpness correction isn’t applied.

My pleasure!

Thank you! I start with optical corrections only. I'm going the route of using Nik for output sharpening. It seems to allow more control and it's nicely calibrated, so easier to get a natural looking finish.

If the Colour Rendering panel is deactivated then Photolab is using the Neutral Colour Profile as a default. For me, you need to choose the best Colour Profile for the shot as a first step as it impacts colour and tone of the image. Don't forget that DXO lets you use dcp profiles in Photolab. If you have difficult images eg overexposed and want to recover highlights a Linear dcp profile will give you the best starting point. It's a 2 min job to create a linear profile using the free Adobe DNG converter and DNG Editor. Personal opinion, but If you have Topaz Photo AI then this is far superior to NIK Presharpener, I have both so.. Topaz will take care of any motion blur in a shot, has AI masking to quickly and accurately target sharpening to specific parts of the image etc. I have found it best to always use DeepPrimeXD noise reduction (lower the force details slider if you see any artifacts) on all images as DeepPrime/XD changes the rendering engine (uniquely in DXO, noise reduction is applied during the demosaic process and you achieve a better raw conversion, which is also why you can't see the effect of noise reduction on the whole image only in the Noise reduction preview window🙂). I also reduce lens Softness to -3 so that Topaz can do the majority of the sharpening. I get better results like this but YMMV.

@@ianyorke2617 All good but note for Apple users ,the Adobe DNG Profile editor hasn't been updated since 2012 and no longer works on Mac OS. I used to use it to generate profiles for my IR converted camera.

Thank you, You can create new control points - where it lists the control points there are four icons, control point, control line, polygonal mask and luminosity mask. Below the list of control points there are three icons, invert selected local adjustment, duplicate local adjustment and bin local adjustment. You need to be in the top row above the list of control points, simply click the control point icon and drop it on the picture. The only setting that will be applied is diffusion at 100%. which smooths the control point settings into the neighbouring pixels. You can alter this setting to taste.

@@chriswrightphotographs Thanks Chris - I'll check it out. I have applied more than one control point in the past, but they were all linked to the same settings. Success - I just tried it again and all was fine....each control point was separately controlled. I was probably using the upper sharpening controls earlier and getting a global effect, rather than the bottom (below the list of control points) for a local effect.

Glad it was helpful! I think you’re right about wildlife photography, local adjustment in Nik Sharpener would give more choices than PL 7

Not knowingly, but I have some stitched panoramas of the Gorafe desert that I’ve been meaning to revisit, I’ll try this, thanks for mentioning it!

Glad you enjoyed it! I’m afraid I ate the food..

I've never used Topaz Noise AI, so I can't give a subjective assessment. What I can say from direct experience is that Noise Reduction in PhotoLab 7 and PureRAW is still considerably better than that in Lightroom, but Adobe are closing what used to be a huge gap. I've heard/read that Noise AI is pretty effective. There is a new Noise Reduction option in PureRAW, XD2 which is slightly more aggressive but allows sharpening to be modified to four levels according to taste. I'd expect that to turn up in PL8.

Thank you!

I have topaz DeNoise and Photo AI (which uses the same tech). It works very well (and with any file type), but I prefer DxO DeepPRIME XD for RAW NR (if needed). Whenever you use any such enhancements (not just NR, but sharpening and Gigapixel in the case of Topaz), you need to be careful not to overdo it, as it can produce some weird artifacts.

Interesting and very logical. How are you finding Topaz AI? I’ve heard very mixed reports but never tried it myself. Intrigued! Regarding the Lightroom mid tones question, I’m pretty sure I can get equivalent corrections with a combo of filters in Color Efex. Might be more complicated though. I’ll test and video - not next week, but week after. “The best filters for landscape Photography”

@@chriswrightphotographs Sorry for the delay - I just got several emails from DxO telling me of their 20th anniversary - splendid - and more to the point, offering a 20% discount on all of their software, so I've just purchased Nik 7, and I'll be installing it next and trying out your suggestion. The Viewpoint software can wait until black friday as I don't have much of a need for it since I can use the pared down tools already available in PL7. As to Topaz photo AI - it is useful, but often I turn the sharpen effect down from the automatic level applied. I like the fact that it comprises several modules in the one program. The upscale seems pretty good and I'm no longer as leery of cropping into a smaller detail in an image. The facial enhancement is ok, but I don't have much need for it as it's mostly sharpening that I use since I'm using either a 100mm macro or the variable zoom producing a shallow depth of field and it doesn't take much motion either from me or a breeze to blur an image. The D500 is an APS-C sensor, so the angle of view is narrowed as well. Again, thanks for your videos - I've sent links to several of my photo friends who've liked them as well.

Yes, in multiple languages! Thanks for the recommendations, much appreciated!

Thanks for pointing this out. I didn’t, feature it as the intention was to take that tiff to Nik Collection and demo sharpening options there. But length deterred me - I’ll do that video for next week.

Thanks Richard, it's becoming an obsession - I'm actually weighing lenses. And food!

Apparently this is a known issue with Photoshop Elements - I found this solution on the Adobe forum - let me know if to works for you? community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-elements-discussions/digital-pen-not-working-in-photoshop-elements/td-p/12005685

I understand, $159 is a lot of money. These companies work to pretty tight margins and all we can do if price/value doesn’t work for us is go elsewhere. Not sure the iPhone is a fair comparison, it’s a phone not a photo processing app and costs about 5 times as much. (That might be a minority opinion though!) Good luck with the hunt!

@@chriswrightphotographs Thank you for the response, Chris. Do any of DXO peers have the same model that you know of? Why not just change to a subscription model.

@@sv0616 If we're talking about DxO ie. including PhotoLab, ViewPoint etc, the only other companies I have in depth experience of are Adobe, Capture One and Luminar. DxO (PhotoLab) compares favourably with Adobe if you upgrade every other version, but it doesn't support layer based editing. so there's that. When I was a commercial photographer in the UK I used Capture One, it is functionally excellent but there is no upgrade path - what you buy, you keep at €349 - they have a tiered subscription model too, the cheapest being €18.25 a month. I opted to move from Capture One to a hybrid workflow of DxO and Adobe depending what I am trying to achieve. I won't comment on Luminar because they have moved a long way from the versions I am familiar with so any comment I make now would be ill informed and probably unfair! I guess the reason the pricing plans for all vendors are so complicated is they don't find it helpful to sales to be compared solely on price. Comparing like for like is practically impossible so I assess the upsides against price - DxO excellent at core function (RAW Processing), Stable, integrates well with Adobe, short learning curve. Adobe, feature rich, affordable, for Photoshop a nearly endless learning curve! Capture One, competitive with DxO, Expensive. If all software cost the same, and I had endless finances, I'd use DxO for RAW processing, Capture One for studio work, Photoshop for layer based editing. Because finances proved not to be endless, something had to give and I elected to drop Capture One. I still think it's excellent but I can't afford it! Comparing Nik is hard because as far as I know it's one of a kind. DxO have completely rewritten the codebase and it works really well as a user friendly finishing tool. The results in the last two versions are of professional standard although it's still possible for the user to create horrible effects! Also worth bearing in mind that the image processing industry is dominated by Adobe, and a wise person would look to evidence of financial stability before buying into a rival software. DxO appear to have that, as do Capture One. Also check forums and google "problems with xxxx" for competitor software, bearing in mind of course that people find it easier to complain than praise! Not sure if this is helpful, and apologies for length!

In some cases, this is to do with changing the color space - so for example Adobe RGB to sRGB is a step down in terms of the number of colours supported. Generally we shoot and edit in the widest possible format. But when you export for print or screen any colour in the original format that are not found in the destination format will be swapped out for a neighbouring tone. In DxO you may be using the DxO Wide Gamut which is comparable with Adobe RGB. This situation is brought about because legacy monitors and printers don't support wide gamut color spaces. The good news is that situation is changing so more and more monitors and platforms such as instagram are supporting the AdobeHDR standard. sRGB may be approaching end of useful life although if you want your image to be viewed reliable on every possible platform its still the way to go.

@@chriswrightphotographs Logically, you are right, but if I create a similar image in Adobe Camera Raw, then when exporting I will not encounter a displacement of all these three points. That's the problem. At least if you look at this experiment visually. In adobe camera raw, I use a line profile of my camera, created in adobe dng editor, based on any of my camera files.

@@chriswrightphotographs And yes - when exporting to tiff, I choose Adobe rgb, so that I can then look at such a file in the same Adobe Photoshop program, or even in DxO itself. The result is depressing. It's the same as if I saved tiff, or jpg to srgb. The image is one to one, as if I were doing the same thing in rawtherapee.

Have you tried to use the icc profile in PL? The only time I use custom profiles is for infrared.

The Reshape tool is part of ViewPoint, it is activated in PL7 by installing Viewpoint on the same computer.

Thanks for the thoughtful input. One further thought - ACR has no equivalent in the Nik Collection. If you are shooting in RAW format then preliminary processing of the RAW file can be done in ACR, Lightroom or DxO PhotoLab and the results "finished off" in Photoshop or the Nik Collection. The equivalent workflow to (ACR and Photoshop) or (Lightroom and Photoshop) is (PhotoLab and Nik Collection). A strength of the Nik Collection is that it is also very well integrated with Photoshop so can be and often is used in the Adobe Workflow as well. Also worth noting that DxO's PureRAW product delivers arguably better demosaicing and noise reduction than ACR or Lightroom and can be used as a pre-processor in the Adobe workflow.

Thank you, that's great to hear!