LeCoqRoti
Fifty-two filters. That is the starting count inside Color Efex Pro alone, before you combine them or reach for the 250 preset effects waiting in its library.
Correct colour: local control with Viveza
Place a control point on a sky or a face and adjust hue, saturation and luminance without a mask. The change radiates outward, respecting natural edges, so a blue shirt stays blue while the wall behind it shifts.
Sharpen and structure: 16-bit precision
Sharpener Pro works in 16-bit colour depth, preserving gradients in skies and skin while pulling fine detail forward. A selective tool in Color Efex Pro can then apply that clarity only to the eyes or the foreground stonework.
Film character: Analog Efex Pro
Over eighty tools simulate wet-plate collodion, multi-lens toy cameras and faded colour stocks. Wet a highlight, crack a border, or let a light leak bloom across one corner — each effect stacks without flattening the original layer.
Rivals on the Mac: three other plugin collections
A photographer choosing a plugin suite often looks at the nik collection mac alongside two other names: Topaz Photo AI and ON1 Effects. Each occupies a different patch of ground.
Topaz Photo AI leans heavily on machine learning for noise reduction, sharpening and upscaling. It works as a standalone application and a plugin, though it does not offer the expansive filter library of Color Efex Pro. Its strength is automatic correction: open an image, let the model run, and accept the result. Creative control is secondary. The nik collection mac asks for more attention but returns more variety in textures, light and film simulations.
ON1 Effects bundles hundreds of look presets, masking tools and a built-in raw processor. It feels closer to a full editing environment than a targeted plugin. Viveza, by contrast, keeps its purpose narrow: place a control point, shift colour and light, move on. Where ON1 blends steps together, the Nik Collection keeps each plugin distinct, which suits someone who wants to move from Dfine to Silver Efex Pro with no extra interface overhead.
A black-and-white workflow: from raw file to print-ready image
Consider a portrait shot under mixed indoor light. The raw file opens in Lightroom, where basic exposure and white balance are corrected first. A virtual copy is made, and the image is sent to Dfine for noise reduction: automatic profiling analyses the sensor pattern, then a small control point on the background applies stronger reduction without softening the eyes.
The next call is Silver Efex Pro. A preset called “Push Process N+1” lifts contrast and midtone structure, but the real work happens in the split preview. One half shows the original colour file, the other shows the conversion, so the effect on skin texture stays visible. A slight selenium tone warms the shadows, and a control point on one cheekbone drops luminance just enough to return shape to the face. Back in Lightroom, the monochrome layer sits above the colour original, opacity at ninety percent, blending a trace of warmth through from below.
The final pass goes to Sharpener Pro. Output sharpening is set for matte paper at 300 dpi, viewed at thirty centimetres. The preview window shows a section of the eyelashes at full size, and the radius is nudged until the catchlight in the iris holds its edge without a halo. The image prints with a grain structure that feels chemical, not digital.
Version 9.0: what changed in daily use
Depth Masks shift how selections are built. The engine reads distance information from the image — where available — and masks areas by their depth plane. A fog effect can be applied only to distant trees, leaving the foreground figure untouched, without painting a mask by hand.
AI Masks extend that logic to subjects without depth data. Click on a person, a sky or a patch of foliage and the mask snaps to the object boundary, even through fine strands of hair. The saved time accumulates quickly when working through a shoot of fifty frames.
Three new effects in Color Efex — Chromatic Shift, Glass Effect and Halation — push the colour grading closer to what a motion-picture colourist expects. Halation, in particular, mimics the red-orange glow around bright highlights on film stock, and it reacts well with the new Color Grading tool, which splits control into shadows, midtones and highlights on a single panel.
The Preset Hover Preview and Mask Overlays make the editing loop faster: hover a preset name and the image updates without committing, then toggle a translucent red overlay to check exactly where the mask reaches. Copy and paste of local adjustments between images completes the set of improvements — tweak one frame of a burst, then paste the same control-point edits across the remaining frames without rebuilding the logic each time.
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