The Nik Nik effect

The Nik Nik effect

There are things that bring us secret joy, or secret shame, or even secret loathing, and I still twitch every time I have to write the name of my favourite and most useful plugin. Nik Efex. It gets worse if I’m working on an image that I don’t want to convert to monochrome – Nik Color Efex…

OK, that’s the negative bit over. Let’s deal with why I love the package, and the bits of it that I use. First recommended to me by Moira (mrswoollybill) for conversions to monochrome quite a few years ago, there are several different elements in Nik, and I routinely use three of them, with occasional use of other parts.



Nik Silver Efex is the mono conversion part, and offers a large number of presets, all of which are modifiable and adjustable, with the option to save your own customised versions. They range from a pretty straightforward mono conversion to high key, low key, pinhole and high contrast, all with twenty different tones and borders available. Again, I emphasise that everything is customisable, including the width and spread of the borders, so it’s important to look and experiment if your learning curve is going to be less extended than mine has been.

I also use the output sharpening module, though only when I am posting smaller images on other sites than Ephotozine. A downside is that the default, after using any module, is a PSD file, rather than a JPG, so you need to convert for posting on the web! The default level of sharpening is excessive to my eyes, so I set up a custom form with less aggressive settings to avoid the gritty, wiry look that says ‘Look at me! I’ve been sharpened!’



Nik Color Efex addresses various possible types of style processing, such as detail extraction (bringing out nuances of colour and tone: used to excess it makes everything blotchy), adding fill light, or even a reasonable simulation of a Polaroid transfer. (Back in the days of two-part Polaroid film, very interesting effects were possible if you pressed a fresh Polaroid print against a damp sheet of paper, transferring the dyes for a grainy and imperfect version – it works a treat on images that lack sharpness, for instance).

Analog Efex simulates badly-processed colour film, and is occasionally useful to give a retro look. Overused, it pales rapidly, just like cheap colour emulsion… I very rarely use the part of it that adds scratches and water stains to the picture – I’ve spent enough time in the darkroom avoiding them to dislike them intensely!

There are noise-suppression and presharpening modules that I simply haven’t opened: they may well be very useful to some, but I find that Photoshop, Elements, Affinity and Gimp2 are entirely adequate – and I’ve never cared much about noise and grain!



There’s an HDR module, which can be used (I’m told) to combine bracketed images for a good result, though I think it’s more often used to spoil entirely good images with a faux HDR look – usually lacking good blacks and with a heavy blue cast. If it floats your visual boat, that’s fine – but it switches off the bilge pumps and knocks a hole below the waterline in mine.

In most of the modules, there’s a feature called ‘Control Points’ allowing you to make localised adjustments to brightness, contrast and structure. This may seem very limiting, given that the adjustment is to a circular area, but in practice, it’s very useful. There’s also a brush facility in some of the modules, to allow selective application (though at present, I can’t see how this differs from using Layers in PS – probably because I am very much a Layers novice). The combination of control points and the brush gives additional options and control (I’m told).



Nik has had a chequered career, starting life with the eponymous Nik Corporation, and sold to Google in 2012. At one point, Google sort of forgot about it, and stopped developing it, and it was, for a while, free to download: and in 2017, DxO acquired the software and started further development, leading to an updated version a couple of years ago, and a third version recently, adding perspective control tools that adjust for lens distortion. I haven’t pursued this because most of my lenses don’t distort much, and there are pretty decent controls in Photoshop if I need them.

Nik operates as a standalone, or as a plugin with Photoshop, Elements and Affinity, though the latter may need a bit of fiddling about. I think that the previous (Google-era) version of Nik is still available as a free download, and to be frank, that’s got most of the really good stuff in it – I only upgraded last year after losing my previous version during a computer upgrade. There are more presets in the second version, but the best advice is play with the original, and see whether it works for you before upgrading.