Digital has revolutionized quite a few industries, including photography. I entered this world right at the moment of transition… and I must say I really don’t miss the old film roll.

A great advantage of digital photography is certainly the fascinating world of post-production. Photography purists hate it, veterans of the old film roll think it’s an abomination. For me, on the other hand, it has become a phase almost as important as the shot itself: with post-production you can completely change a mediocre photo and turn it into a unique shot, add dynamism, give character to an insipid photo.

This little guide will teach you exactly that (or so we hope): the photo I’ll use was taken in France and it’s the very famous Notre Dame de Paris.

Before we start

To follow this guide you need professional software: I used Adobe Photoshop. You can also use Aperture or Lightroom. These programs cost a lot: the first thing to do is buy them or hope your company has a license for you, or that some friend of yours is particularly kind and passes you one of their license slots (Photoshop can be used on up to 3 PCs with a single license).

This guide doesn’t aim to teach you how to use these programs; let’s say having at least a basic knowledge of them is a prerequisite.

The star software of this guide, however, is this collection of plugins that rely on them: Nik Collection.

Until last year this suite cost about $500, and in my opinion it was worth every penny. Now instead Google has decided to make it free!

Choosing the photo

The first thing to do is choose which shot you intend to improve / modify. One thing must be clear: post-production can work miracles but there’s a limit to everything. If the initial photo is bad, it’s likely that even under heavy retouching it will still be bad. Post-production enhances the content, but if the initial value is zero it’s hard for something sensational to come out. So always try to take the best possible shot to have a good starting point. My photo is this one: I took it with my LG G3, not a DSLR, just a 3-year-old smartphone. During my stay in Paris I didn’t have anything better, but it still has great potential.

Once the photo is chosen you have to decide what to do: maybe if you don’t know what Nik Collection can do, this step will be a bit difficult for you. My goal in this photo is to enhance the cathedral, make the details stand out and give a dramatic tone, typical of cathedrals, to the whole scene.

Let’s get to know Nik Collection

Now that we’ve decided our starting point and our goal, it’s time to get to know the tools at our disposal.

If you haven’t already, download Nik Collection and install it. Photoshop must already be present on your PC.

Once installed, if you start Photoshop, you can see a small new box where you can choose the various plugins that make up this suite:

• Dfine: it’s the first plugin to start. Its job is to remove noise from photos.
• Analog Efex Pro: simulates the effect of old films and old cameras that made history with their particular effects. Do you remember Instagram filters? Well, you’ve grasped what this plugin can do.
• Color Efex Pro: if you want to correct some tints, create effects that have to do with colors, this plugin is perfect.
• Silver Efex Pro: very useful if you want to create a monochromatic image.
• Viveza: great if you want to modify only specific parts of the photo, highlight subjects.
• HDR Efex Pro: to create an HDR image. Without getting too technical, to create a real HDR image you need multiple shots of the same subject using different exposures. But this plugin manages to achieve the same result even from a single image.
• Sharpener Pro: its job is to make details stand out and make the image less blurry.

If for some reason the Nik Collection box doesn’t appear, you can find all these programs in the top menu under Filters > Nik Collection.

Let’s remove the noise

Now it’s time to start! The first step I always take is removing noise from the photo. If the shot was taken with a camera that isn’t particularly powerful, like my smartphone, this step is practically mandatory. Noise, even if imperceptible, is amplified during the editing steps. So cleaning the image from these disturbances is very important.

This step is very simple. Load the image into Photoshop, start Dfine. As you open it you can notice that it does some magic and removes noise automatically. It might seem like nothing has changed; actually to appreciate Dfine’s work it’s useful to zoom the image to 100%. To do that double-click the image; finally, at the top left, where it says Views, you have three display modes:

• Single image view: the default view. You only see the final output.
• Split view: you can see the image before and after applying the filter at the same time. You can also move the red line to have a quick comparison between the two versions.
• Side by side preview: basically you’ll have the two images, before and after applying the filter, side by side.

Once you’ve been able to appreciate the changes, press OK. So you can move on to the next step.

HDR Efex Pro, it’s your turn!

Now it’s time to add a touch of HDR to the image. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and it’s a photographic technique that allows you to show more details than a normal photograph. Do you remember those situations where you take a photo of an environment that has both particularly bright and dark spots? It happens that the very bright part comes out as just a nice white patch and the dark part as a black patch. HDR manages to overcome these problems. This is just to give you an idea of what HDR is; you’d need to write a guide just on this… But it’s better to get back to our image!

Always from the Nik Collection box, in the HDR Efex Pro section choose Tone Mapping (Single Image).

On the left side you can find the Preset Library, in it there are already some great starting points. I chose Deep 1 which is in the Realistic library.

Once you’ve chosen the starting point you can focus on the part on the right of the window. Here you can find a sea of configurations to modify every single aspect of the filter. The macro areas are these:

• Tone Compression: here are all the settings that only concern the HDR effect. Surely this is where you find the settings that radically change the appearance of your image.
• Tonality: here you can find the classic image settings like exposure, shadows, highlights, contrast, etc. An option I particularly like is structure. By increasing it you can notice how the image becomes particularly defined. Be careful not to overdo it because in addition to enhancing details it also enhances noise. That’s why I strongly recommended removing it with Dfine… Now the chickens come home to roost!
• Finishing: it’s the post-production of the post-production effect! I mean, it’s the final touches you can make before leaving this plugin. From this area I added a small vignetting effect. Near the Vignette text there’s a small selection menu. I chose Lens 2. The vignetting effect does nothing more than darken the edges of the image (or lighten them). It’s a great way to guide the observer’s attention. In this case my intent is to enhance the cathedral.

In this case too I haven’t gone into too much detail. My advice is to play and try all the various features yourself. Only this way can you master this suite… By using it!

Here’s the final result after this step.

Let’s correct the colors

Now the image has a much more dramatic tone than the original, it suits a cathedral very well. The details of the structure have been highlighted, we can be satisfied with our work! There’s just one small problem… The cathedral has become a canary! It’s too saturated and so we need to remove some saturation from the cathedral.

To do this let’s start Color Efex Pro. The window that opens should be familiar by now: only the starting filters on the left and the settings on the right change.

The filter we’ll use to desaturate the image is called Bleach Bypass. Let’s select it from the available filters and we immediately notice the changes on the image.

So far we’ve applied the filters to the whole image; in this case we want to apply it only to the cathedral without affecting the rest.

Say hello to control points!

To solve this problem we need to learn a very important feature that I’ve kept hidden from you until now. Control points.

These “control points” allow you to apply the filter only to specific areas. Let’s immediately try using one. On the right side look for the Control Points function; here you can notice two buttons: the first shows a circle with a ”+” next to it and the other a ”-“. The difference between the two is that the first adds a point with 100% opacity, the second with 0%. In other words the first applies the filter at the selected point, the second removes it.

We need to apply the filter at the point we select. So we need to press the button with the ”+“. Once pressed, move the cursor over the cathedral; you’ll notice that the cursor symbol has become a sort of crosshair; click on the cathedral. Nik Collection is smart enough to understand that you want to apply the filter only to the selected point, so it removes the filter from the rest of the image and leaves it only on the control point.

Once the control point is placed you can notice that there’s a small circle on the image with two sliders. The first determines the range of the control point, the second its opacity. Obviously the larger the range, the more our filter will affect a larger portion of the image, and the more we increase the opacity the more the difference is noticeable (in our case it’s already at 100%).

Since the control point has a circular range, I recommend adding many small points rather than having one big one to have more control over it.

But how do we understand the real range of a control point? In fact Nik Collection applies the filter intelligently: even though the range is circular, you don’t notice the point where it stops applying these corrections. Precisely because Nik’s strong point is its algorithms for creating the application masks. This sentence is probably gibberish for those who aren’t familiar with Photoshop, but it will be clear shortly. To understand what I wrote let’s go back to Color Efex Pro; in the Control Points section we can notice the list of our added points. Each entry in this list is made up of 4 points:

• Checkbox to enable the control point.
• Its name.
• The percentage of the image affected.
• Checkbox to show the application point (its mask).

Let’s check this last checkbox of any control point we’ve added. The image becomes monochromatic and from here we can actually see the real application point of the selected control point’s filter. Black indicates that the filter hasn’t been applied, white where it has been applied, the various intermediate shades indicate a different opacity of the application.

Add all the control points necessary to “make the cathedral white”; this way you’ll apply the filter only to the cathedral. Here’s my white cathedral, a sign that I’m applying the bleach bypass filter only to it.

In my opinion control points are the real strong point of Nik Collection. To create the same mask using only Photoshop, instead of taking 5 minutes, it would have taken us hours!

Once we’ve made sure the filter is applied only to the cathedral, we can uncheck the checkboxes of the control points’ masks and go back to viewing the normal image.

Finally here we are!

Conclusions

Here’s the final result next to our original image:

I hope this guide has given you a vague idea of the potential of this plugin suite. Obviously this is just the tip of the tip of the iceberg: my intent isn’t to explain the suite and all its commands, but to apply it in a real use case.

If you feel like learning more, I strongly recommend this introductory video tutorial… It’s in English and lasts an hour… But it’s really worth it!

See you next time!