If you find a combination of filters and settings works well for you, you can save it as a Recipe. You can add one or more ‘minus’ control points to remove the darkening effect from these objects and, if this takes away too much of the darkening effect from the sky around them, you can drop in a couple of ‘plus’ control points to restore it. These control points work especially well with the Graduated Filter effects, solving that age-old problem of tall buildings or mountains jutting up into the sky. With just a few moments’s work you can can create subtly blended adjustments that have a very natural look and none of the harsh boundary transitions you so often get with selections in other photo editing software. Initially, these control points can feel a little crude and indiscriminate, but once you start moving them around, adjusting the parameters – and when you realise you can duplicate then group them – they become very powerful indeed.
You adjust the opacity of the control point with a slider to either remove the filter effect from an area or add it in. You click to add a control point and it adds its own mask, based on the colour values where you clicked, and which operates over an adjustable radius. I’ve never used the burnt landscape look of Indian Summer, the false colours of the Ink filter or the soft-focus Duplex effect amongst others, but others might.īut some filters are near-indispensible, such as the Graduated Filters, Contrast Colour Range (brilliant for bringing out colour in landscapes), Detail Extractor and Tonal Contrast filters.Įach filter has its own adjustment parameters, displayed in the panel on the right side of the screen, and – crucially – they all use Nik’s control point technology for localised adjustments (you can also find this in DxO PhotoLab, launched after DxO acquired the Nik Collection and its technologies).
The filters themselves vary in usefulness, to be fair. There are 55 filters in all, but you can thin down the list by clicking on one of the category buttons at the top: Landscape, Wedding, Architecture, Favourites, Nature, Portrait, Travel. Color Efex Pro’s strengths are its wide array of filters (left), the ability to ‘stack’, or combine them (right) and its control point local adjustments for each filter.
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The Color Efex Pro screen layout takes the now-standard plug-in format, with a list of filter effects in a vertical panel on the left, a main window which displays the image you’re working on in the middle and manual adjustment tools on the right. If you use them on their own, the filter effects vary from essential through interesting to so esoteric you might never use them, but when you start using control point adjustments and stacking multiple filters, you discover what this plug-in is truly capable of. Color Efex Pro is a slow burner, but brilliant.Ĭolor Efex Pro is one of the older plug-ins in the DxO Nik Collection and it feels like this is where least has changed. AND you get control point adjustments too.
Dig deeper, though, and you’ll find its best filters are very useful indeed and the ability to combine filters into Recipes dramatically expands its potential. Colour Efex Pro initially looks a little dated, with some good filters but a whole lot more filters you think you might never find a use for.
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