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Nik's New Software Program--Analog Efex


sanyasi

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I have not seen this discussed in another thread--pardon if it has--but the Nik suite has a new program--Analog Efex, which is meant to simulate analog photography. I played with it last night for about 25 minutes.

 

There are five basic filters or modes that you can work with: Classic Camera, Wet Plate, Toy Camera, and Vintage Camera, plus Camera Kit (which seems to permit you to put together a combination of the features in the other filters or modes.

 

Analog Efex appears to be a little bit more razzle dazzle than the other Nik Software programs, with the possible exception of Color Efex. You can add textures, dirt and scratches, film type (which seems to be more like tints than specific emulations), vignettes, photo plates, lens distortion, zoom and rotate blur, light leaks, and frames.

 

I found the light leaks to be the most interesting because I find that sometimes real ones can make a photograph interesting.

 

Probably the most interesting aspect is the interface for putting Bokeh and vignettes into place. The tool for deciding where to place these effects and how much to use is much better than the existing sliders in other programs. I hope Nik updates the other programs for these more visual tools (lines are overlaid to show the shape and location of the effects).

 

I was using a black and white photograph. Analog Efex is not something I will be using with every photograph, but it is good to have it.

 

The question is whether I have it. I couldn't find the page to download it or buy is if you already own the entire Nik Suite. I downloaded the trial, which appears to have updated all my Nik products and I think I am good to go. Nothing is popping up saying I have 14 days to go. But if necessary I will give Nik a call.

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It is free if you already have the Nik Suite. The 'upgrade' caused a few problems for users last week, but it all seems to have settled down now.

 

I've not looked closely at it yet and my first impression was it's for camera phone users and Lomographers, being typical of the effects you commonly see, but that's no bad thing as some are doing interesting work.

 

Steve

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Yes, if you have the full Nik installation, you can download the entire current trial version & install it.

It will automatically read your serial number & give a full install.

I found those instructions on the Nik help forum, and it worked perfectly on my install.

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Thought I would share my recent experience with a Nik-related Photoshop error message as it might help others a bit.

 

I too have the Nik suite as a plug-in to Photoshop CS6. When I went to open Photoshop earlier this week, I got an error message saying that PS could not open as the file "msvcp110.dll" was missing. This surprised me, as I have not made any recent changes to my Photoshop installation. After a bit of messing around, I determined that the missing file is part of Microsoft's Visual C++ redistributable application, so I downloaded the latest (2012) version from Microsoft website, which fixed the problem.

 

The strange thing is that I would never have noticed any change to my Nik plug-in had I not read this thread, and would never have connected the missing dll file with the Nik plug-in. Apparently what happened, in my case and I'm sure others as well, is that the Nik plug-in automatically (and surreptitiously) downloaded an update including Analog Efex, which triggered the missing dll issue.

 

So if anyone else encounters this issue, it might be worthwhile downloading Microsoft's Visual C++ redistributable application (2012) version.

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Jay above said, "Yes, if you have the full Nik installation, you can download the entire current trial version & install it.It will automatically read your serial number & give a full install."

 

For me, that only partially worked. The installer indicates that the download is for both LR and Aperture. But while I received permanent installation within LR, the installation within Aperture was strangely a mere 15-day trial. Except for black & white photography with my Monochrome M, up to now I have mostly used Aperture. So I'm deeply disappointed.

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Interesting, I don't use Aperture (Windows guy), and the trial version picked up both my LR & PS CC apps & installed properly & used the existing s/n.

The Nik forum that I got the idea from didn't talk about Apple, just Win, so it may be an issue with that OS.

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  • 2 weeks later...

analog efex must be some sort of automatic download / update. i went to CS6 ''filters'' this evening, and found ANALOG EFEX for the first time. no action required on my part, but a nice surprise.

 

on the down side, the mavericks update doesn't support mark/space notebook, which i use on my mac and iphone. wait and see!

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