Old or New Version of NIK?

Hi, Where I live now I just could not get back into the use of HDR however soon we hope to be back in the UK where IMO there is a far greater offering of subject material for HDR. Anyway I have the original version of the NIK collection and always thought that the HDR images it produced where without any re-touching very close to WYSIWYG I also have SNS-HDR but although Sebastian has made some minor changes it is to me like the original NIK collection. Anyone here use the new DXO NIK collection and if yes what has in your opinion really improved as far as HDR goes?

Hi, Where I live now I just could not get back into the use of HDR however soon we hope to be back in the UK where IMO there is a far greater offering of subject material for HDR. Anyway I have the original version of the NIK collection and always thought that the HDR images it produced where without any re-touching very close to WYSIWYG I also have SNS-HDR but although Sebastian has made some minor changes it is to me like the original NIK collection. Anyone here use the new DXO NIK collection and if yes what has in your opinion really improved as far as HDR goes?

I have Nik (original), Olonio, Photomatix and LR cc. In the past, I found that Photomatix had some significant issues, Olonio was the quickest and easiest, Nik had advantages in a few cases only. In particular, I wanted a fairly natural look and Olonio had a setting which achieved this. While I would always try to use a tripod for HDR sets, occasionally I had to hand-hold and found Olonio was not always able to align images. In such cases, I found Nik to perform better at aligning the images. The control points are sometimes useful and NIK Silver Efex pro is still my favourite B&W conversion. However, in my view, none of these can compete with Lightroom cc Classic for HDR. The combined images are still in Raw (32 bit) and can be edited in LR which then has a huge adjustment range (e.g. +/- ten stops instead of five). You have all the LR tools available so the editing is very powerful and this method results in natural colours. The only disadvantage (not for me though) is that you have to be prepared to edit the file manually. Having said that while LR normally defaults to neutral settings for 16 bit Raw files, it does automatically preset the settings for 32 bit HDR files so you have a good starting point. This does not specifically answer your question but, if you use LR cc, you should explore that first. Dave

I have Nik (original), Olonio, Photomatix and LR cc. In the past, I found that Photomatix had some significant issues, Olonio was the quickest and easiest, Nik had advantages in a few cases only. In particular, I wanted a fairly natural look and Olonio had a setting which achieved this. While I would always try to use a tripod for HDR sets, occasionally I had to hand-hold and found Olonio was not always able to align images. In such cases, I found Nik to perform better at aligning the images. The control points are sometimes useful and NIK Silver Efex pro is still my favourite B&W conversion. However, in my view, none of these can compete with Lightroom cc Classic for HDR. The combined images are still in Raw (32 bit) and can be edited in LR which then has a huge adjustment range (e.g. +/- ten stops instead of five). You have all the LR tools available so the editing is very powerful and this method results in natural colours. The only disadvantage (not for me though) is that you have to be prepared to edit the file manually. Having said that while LR normally defaults to neutral settings for 16 bit Raw files, it does automatically preset the settings for 32 bit HDR files so you have a good starting point.


This does not specifically answer your question but, if you use LR cc, you should explore that first.


Dave