Nik Multimedia has a somewhat curious product line. Sharpener Pro and Color Efex Pro, its two collections of plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop, offer many features and capabilities that are already built-in to most image editors. So why in the world would you ever spend $299.95 for a package like Color Efex Pro?
Because in addition to providing a streamlined interface to many actions that are normally fairly complicated with Photoshop, Color Efex Pro creates results in just a few clicks that might normally take hours of experimentation and fiddling. And, in a few cases, Color Efex Pro provides capabilities that you would be hard-pressed to pull off at all on your own.
For the most part, Nik Multimedia has eschewed wacky effects and weird psychedelia in favor of color corrections modeled on real-world techniques used by analog photographers. If you’re already familiar with using lens filters to improve contrast, polarize images, or create varying exposures in an image, then you’ll feel right at home with Color Efex.
Mostly Filtering
You install Color Efex Pro’s 55 filters by simply copying them into the plug-ins folder of Photoshop or of any software that supports Photoshop plug-ins. In Photoshop the Color Efex Pro filters appear in a special Color Efex Pro sub-menu of the main Photoshop Filter menu.
As mentioned earlier, many of the Color Efex Pro filters are modeled after real-world filters you might attach to the lens of your camera. For example, experienced film photographers know that when shooting black and white, you can use red or yellow filters to darken skies, or green filters to increase the contrast in foliage. Nik Multimedia has provided some amazing filters that achieve these same effects on color images — without adding a color cast to the image. So, throw a Color Efex Pro Contrast Red filter on to your image and you’ll see your skies darken and your reds desaturate, but no other colors will be affected!
Color Efex Pro provides separate contrast filters for blue, cyan, magenta, green, yellow, and red, and each filter provides sliders for controlling brightness and contrast within the filter’s color range, as well as a Spectrum slider for fine-tuning the color temperature range you would like to adjust. Experienced Photoshop users might be afraid of brightness and contrast controls, given that they tend to wreck the white and black points in your image, but you can relax with Color Efex Pro. During our testing its brightness and contrast controls did a much better job than the controls in most image editors of preserving black points, white points, and overall tonal curves.
Graduation
Color Efex Pro’s graduated filters show the same intelligence as its contrast filters as they adjust color and contrast along a gradient. Offering a number of corrections, these filters have an automatic layer mask that constrains their influence to just the top or bottom of an image, and that smoothly fades the effect to create an even transition between filtered and non-filtered areas.
In addition to orange, blue, and bi-color graduated filters that can be used to create somewhat surreal results, Color Efex Pro includes a number of more-practical colors that can be used to automatically improve the appearance of skies in your images. Graduated Blue 201h, for example, adds color and contrast to blown-out or overexposed skies, without altering the appearance of the landscape at the bottom of an image.
Original image.
Color Efex Pro’s Graduated Blue 201h filter makes it easy to add color to a washed-out or blown-out sky.
Graduated Grey 0h (zero-h), meanwhile, will darken a sky, thus improving contrast, without altering its color. Like the other graduated filters, the built-in layer mask preserves the tone of the bottom of your image. In addition to color and intensity controls, each of these filters includes sliders for adjusting the angle of the filter’s horizon.
Weird Colors
Color Efex Pro also includes a number of filters that perform rather extreme color changes. The Midnight series, for example, consists of five different-colored filters that you can use to create a dark, sinister mood in an image. Color Stylizer and Duplex, meanwhile, create effects roughly akin to monotones and duotones.
Old Photo does just what it says — it makes your image look like an old photo, and offers complete control over tint, grain, and contrast adjustment. Pastel creates a washed out, highly-unsaturated image that is ideal for backgrounds, whether in print or on the Web.
The oddly named Monday Morning filter is the closest thing to a “special effect” filter that Color Efex Pro provides. Offering several different-colored versions, Monday Morning produces a very attractive soft, somewhat blurry image with very diffuse colors, and a nice amount of smeary noise. In many ways, it looks like a variation of the Old Photo filter. As with most special-effects filters, Monday Morning is probably not something you’ll use very often.
This article was last modified on December 14, 2022
This article was first published on September 4, 2001
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