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DxO has just released Nik Collection 8 with some really cool new features. I recorded two demos for their virtual press tour to highlight the new capabilities, and I'm going to show you those here. I'm also creating a series of tutorials for their website, which you can watch at DxO.com, or I may end up uploading those here as well. For now though, here's the most important new features in Nik Collection 8. I'm PhotoJoseph, and I'm going to give you a quick tour of some of the newest features in Nik Collection 8, using Color Efex, Silver Efex and Analog Efex. One of the most important capabilities of the Nik Collection has always been its masking features, originating with the Control Point, its ability to isolate specific regions of an image based on luminance and chrominance has always been unparalleled. Over time, the Control Point has expanded to include Control Lines, Control Polygons, Luminosity Masks, and more.
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Well now it's 2025 and Photoshop has given us a whole new type of masking through AI. Photoshop's ability to quickly and accurately select entire subjects in a photo opens up a whole new world of editing capabilities. So with this edition of the Nik Collection, one of the primary focuses was to provide seamless integration of masks. With Nik Collection 8, you now have the ability to use masks generated in Photoshop inside of the Nik Collection and use masks generated in the Nik Collection inside of Photoshop. Let's have a look. In this photo of Hero Square from Budapest, you can see that I already have a few different mask layers created, but I'm going to create one more for the sky. I'll take that original layer and duplicate it, call that “sky”, and then using the AI masking tools, I'll just click on the sky… and add a mask to that layer.
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And now I've got a layer just of the sky. So you can see here I have my statues, I have my entire monument and I have the sky. I'll turn all of those back on and send them over to Color Efex. But first, let's take a look at the new Nik launching palette. Under the preferences, you'll see a few very important options. First, what do I want to send to the plugin? A combination of all visible layers, or just the active layer? I'll leave it at the default of “all visible layers”. And then for masks, do I want to send all masks, just the selected masks or none at all? Again, I'll leave it on the default of “All masks”. I can access each one of my individual plugins from here, which will simply open up its own dedicated palette. From its own launch palette, I can access the last edit that I made, my favorite presets, or my favorite filters, or of course, I can open the plugin directly.
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Now in Color Efex, this should look familiar. I have on the left my presets where I can choose any one of the existing presets, which will load a series of filters over here on the right showing all the different filters that have been added with that preset. Or I can choose to create my own from scratch by simply going to the filters menu and adding the ones that I want. I'm going to start with “Film Efex: Modern (Branded)”, and from here I'll choose one of the cool film looks that I've got in here. Let's go for Fuji Superia 400, which is a look that I really like for this photo except that the contrast and the monument is a little bit too strong. Now, I could just go to the curves in here and adjust that to take some of that strength away, but I do really like the way that the sky looks right now, so I don't want to affect the entire image;
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I just want to affect the monument itself. To do that, I'm going to add another filter. Let's go ahead and add the “Levels & Curves”, and I'll start adjusting that. I'm going to set it to adjust just the luminance channel, and then I'll bring the shadows up just a little bit and the highlights down a little to flatten out the monument just a touch. Of course, this has affected the entire image, which is exactly what I didn't want. So now I want to limit this filter to the monument. To do that, I'll go to the new Photoshop mask import button. From here I can choose which masks I want to import. In this case, I'll go for the entire monument, click plus, and now that filter is affecting only the monument. Next, I want to do something similar to the statues. They're getting a little bit lost against the blue sky in here, so let's change their saturation.
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I'll search for “saturation”, pull up my “Brilliance/Warmth” tool, and immediately add the mask for just the statues. So once again, I'll click on the import button and then choose the statues. Now as I adjust the saturation, we can see that it's affecting just the statues in there. Let's say at this point that I like what I've got so far, but I'm not sure if I'm done or not. So I want to save a version of the image as we see it here. There's a couple of different ways to do this. The first one is to simply go up to the top and choose export as TIFF or export as JPEG. Where that file will go is defined in the preferences. I've already set mine to the Desktop, so I'll simply click on “Export as TIFF”, and it renders it out to the Desktop.
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Now let's continue working with the photo. I'm going to add a little bit of a sunset look to this. So I'll type in gradient, add a graduated filter, and then let's give it a bit of a sunset vibe. So let's look for some nice, rich orange colors in here… and the sunset's upside down, so I'll flip that over, bring the vertical shift up and blend that in a little bit more. Looking all right, but obviously this is way too intense on the monument itself. You probably know where this is going. I'm going to mask out just to the sky. So one more time. I'm going to import from Photoshop the mask of the sky, and now it's applied only to the sky, but of course on a real sunset, some of that light would be hitting the monuments itself. So now we're going to combine the Photoshop mask with masks built in the Nik Collection, and the two of them will blend together.
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Watch. First, let's look at the mask as it is. That's the mask that I'm working with. So again, apply it entirely to the sky and not at all to the monuments. Now let's bring some of the monuments in using a Control Line. I'll click and drag up on the monument, and that's going to add in anything that has that base color and contrast of the concrete back into the image, but that's probably a bit too much. So how about I take the opacity of that and drag it down a bit, and you can see how the two different masks are blending together. Now, I'll hide the mask and see what the result is. Still a little bit too strong, so I'll take the opacity back down a little bit. And there we go. Now I'm ready to send this back to Photoshop. I have a couple options from here of how I want to send this back, and one of those options is “New Layer with Mask”.
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In previous versions of the Nik collection, choosing this option would open up a palette where you could brush between the original and the affected image, but then once you hit apply that rendered a permanent mask. It basically blended the two and you had no option to go back. So now what it does instead is it simply applies a Photoshop mask on export like this. I'll select that option, click apply, and now you can see the image is here, but the mask is totally black, meaning if I grab something as simple as a brush tool and start brushing that in, I'm now brushing between the two layers. We can see that represented in the mask icon here. So that's a first look at some of the new features in Nik Collection 8. In the previous demo, you saw how to bring masks from Photoshop into Nik 8.
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Now you'll see how masks are additionally shared between plugins and how masks created in the Nik Collection can be shared back to Photoshop. Let's start in Silver Efex. For this photo, I'm not going to do any masking in Photoshop, but instead go straight into Silver Efex. Right away you'll notice a big difference in Silver Efex, and that is that all the filters are no longer on the right. Now, Silver Efex works more like Color Efex where none of the filters are added until you need them. I can either add them manually or by choosing one of the presets here. The filters that are needed for that preset will be added on the right. If I revert the image back to its neutral state, then all those filters go away. There is one thing that's still here though, and that is the “Film Types”. You can think of film types like your original black and white processing; how the image is converted from color to black and white — what is the basic film stock, the grain pattern, the color sensitivity, and so on.
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It's actually important that you start with this before adding other filters because if you add a filter first and then go back and change the basic processing, the entire look of the image can change. So you really do want to start with the Film Types. You have a bunch of different film types that you can start with, and of course each one of these provides a unique base look for your image. I'll choose this one to start with. One of the most important parts of a film's look is its color sensitivity. How sensitive was the film to red colors, to yellow colors, blue, and so on. And by adjusting these you can dramatically change the overall look of your image. The problem is that you don't necessarily know what part of the image you're changing other than just dragging the sliders around and seeing what happens.
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And the reason for that is you can't see the original color image. Well, you used to not be able to, but now with Nik 8, you can. If I go down here to the bottom left corner, you'll see there's a new ORIGINAL IMAGE tab. That shows me the original color image. So now I know exactly what parts of the image I'll be affecting with each one of these sliders. For example, here we see a lot of blue and purple and this part of the photo, if I go over here to my blue sliders and change that, you'll see that that's affecting that part of the image. So now we just have a lot more control and knowledge over what we're doing. So let's start affecting this photo. It's a photo of a wine cellar and the wine bottles over here on the edges are getting a bit lost.
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It's just a little bit too crunchy. We can see that my black levels have been dropped quite a bit, so I'm going to recover that. Maybe even raise it up a little bit about like so. Now the bottles look better, but the wine racks themselves are way too bright. What color are the wine racks? Well, if I look at my color image, I can see that they're largely yellow and red. So if I go to my film sensitivity and take the yellows and the reds down a bit, I should be able to darken all of those colors in the image. Now that I've done my basic black and white conversion, I can add other filters to this, knowing that my underlying layer is not going to change dramatically. I'll go ahead and add a bit of a sepiatone like this to the image. Now let's continue to refine the image. I'm going to add a basic adjustment and I want to darken the floor. So to do that, I'm going to use a controlled polygon, which was added in the previous version of Nik Collection, and draw polygon over the floor area, very quickly outlining this shape like so. To preview the mask that I've just drawn, I can click on this icon here and we'll see the mask that I've just created.
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Now to darken that floor, I'll just go to the brightness slider and pull that down a bit. Next, this bright spot on the back wall has lost some of its texture and structure, so let's fix that. To do that, I'm going to use a new local adjustment, the new color mask. This will allow me to create a mask based off of the color of the original image. So here I've just clicked where the image is predominantly blue, and if we take a look at the mask that I've just created, we can see that it is affecting the blue areas. If I grab that color mask point and drag it around the image, you can see how it's masking specific colors depending on where I position it, but I'll go ahead and put it back here towards blue, and then let's refine that. Under the mask options, you can see exactly the color range that's been selected, and you can see on this Hue band that it selected largely blue.
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If I want to expand or contract that, I can start by feathering that in and out or expanding the entire selected range. You'll notice that these are linked together right now; if I click this little chain icon, it is going to unlink those ranges, so now I can adjust them independently. I really want to narrow this down, so let's contract that to… right about there. Now I'll hide the mask and let's take the structure of that part of the image and crank it way up. Excellent. Earlier I showed you how if you want to save the current state of an image, you can export a JPEG or TIFF file of the image as it currently is. But there's another way to do that. Instead of saving it out as a separate file, you can save it as a hidden layer inside of Photoshop. To do that, simply click on send as layer.
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Now, this version as we see it currently will be in Photoshop rendered out as a hidden layer so that when we go back to Photoshop, it's there waiting for us. I'm not quite done with this image, but I am done with it in Silver Efex. Now, I could simply apply this and then reopen it in another plugin, or I could send it directly to the plugin, from here within Silver Efex. Watch this. Up in the top right, I can choose to send this image and its masks to any of the other plugins. This allows me to keep all the masking work I've done in this plugin, including generated and imported masks and carry them over to another. Now that I'm an Analog Efex, let's add a little bit of a light leak. Click on the Plus here. I'm going to choose from my Crisp Collection, and I'll grab this one here that I like, and let's position that right in the center.
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Maybe even bring up the intensity a little bit. Looking pretty good, however, it's a bit too strong on the floor here. Well .remember, I already created a mask for the floor over in Silver Efex, and that mask is available for me here in Analog Efex. Just like I'd import a Photoshop mask, I'll click on the import button, and there we can see the masks that I created in Silver Efex; my Control Polygon and the Color Mask. The polygon for the floor is the one that I want, so I'll add that in, and it is the entire polygon, so I could even adjust this if I wanted to. But in my case, all I'm going to do is take the strength of that texture down a bit. That's better. Now, let's save this as another layer in Photoshop because I want to keep on playing, so I'll send that out as a new layer and then add something else.
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How about I add a quick picture frame to this? I'll choose something really dramatic and call it a day. Now I'm ready to apply this, but there is one more option in here that I want to show you. I can now choose to include the plugin masks back in Photoshop. The one that I want is that Control Polygon for the floor. So I'll go ahead and save that, and now click apply. Now we see a couple of things happening here in Photoshop. First of all, there's the final image that I just created, but here's the hidden layers of the two other versions as I was playing with it. So there's the one from Silver Efex, the original from Analog Efex, and the final version. Where's that mask that I saved though? Well, there it is, under channels. There is the Control Polygon mask that I created in Silver Efex.
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So now you can see that the masks created in Photoshop can be brought into the Nik Collection, and the masks created in the Nik Collection can be brought back to Photoshop. It gives you the ultimate flexibility in working with masks. Thanks for watching, and if you want to check out the Nik collection for yourself, please use the link down below and also watch for more tutorials on Nik Collection 8 on the DxO website and here on my YouTube channel. As always, if you have questions about Nik 8 or anything else covered on this channel, comment below or even better jump into the PhotoJoseph Channel Member Discord server for a more direct conversation. I'll see you in the next video.
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