GeoffM33 Posted November 14, 2017 Share Posted November 14, 2017 Hi, I have just installed the NIK Collection of Plug-ins. What are the advantages of using these as compared with the built-in Affinity Photo tools? Especially the de-noising and sharpening tools - are they "better" or just presented differently? Do they work in a different way? What can they do that Affinity can't? Cheers. GM33 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
verysame Posted November 14, 2017 Share Posted November 14, 2017 For general use, I'm fine with Affinity denoiser, but in tricky situations Nik's dfine works much better. There are things that you can't replicate in Affinity (or any other raster editing software really), like Silver Efex which features print emulation. The trade off is you break the workflow as any operation you do in Nik is destructive. So, it really depends what's the type of job your are doing. I tend to use dfine and silver Efex: as for the latter, I usually prepare the work with the Affinity's tools (basic color correction to have a good starting point) and, as a last step, I work in silver Efex (as I would do with a LUT). I save my presets in silver Efex so I can later re-use them or transfer them to another machine. v_kyr 1 Quote Andrew - Win10 x64 AMD Threadripper 1950x, 64GB, 512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD + 2TB, dual GTX 1080ti Dual Monitor Dell Ultra HD 4k P2715Q 27-Inch Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Rostron Posted November 15, 2017 Share Posted November 15, 2017 Yes, the Nik plug-ins are destructive in that they replace the active layer. You need to remember to duplicate the actve layer before invoking Nik. (Which I do not always remember to do!) Quote Windows 10, Affinity Photo 1.10.5 Designer 1.10.5 and Publisher 1.10.5 (mainly Photo), now ex-Adobe CC CPU: AMD A6-3670. RAM: 16 GB DDR3 @ 666MHz, Graphics: 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GT 630 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GeoffM33 Posted November 16, 2017 Author Share Posted November 16, 2017 Thanks for your comments and work-flow tips. I will continue with Nik on this basis and watch this topic for other info. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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