I was going to say something about Google cutting off future support for Nik Collection, but then Dimitrios went and said what I was thinking already anway…
I’m always very disappointed by people giving tutorials and editing workshops and explaining things like: “open the X slider in the Action Pack/Plugin and type 42, you’re done!”… ok smart*ss what if version 2.3 of the software changes the function behind the slider???. In my professional career (not in photography, but the logic is universal) I’ve always coached people to learn the FUNCTION of the tools they use and not focus on the tool itself. Most of them, have grown to eventually re-write the tool to suit their needs and not the other way around (limiting themselves to the capabilities of the tool)…
Having never used Nik tools (too expensive when they were a paid too; no windows box when they were free), and not knowing what they do, is it possible to replicate some functionity in our own free tooling? Like gmic or imagemagick?
@paperdigits Theoretically: Yes, of course it is possible to replicate some/most/all of the functionality. It will “just” take a tremendous amount of time and knowledge to succeed…
Over the years I have played with the trials to see what the fuss was all about. The Nik Collection certainly had a cult following and I believe that was the source of its undoing. Part of its fan base was toxic with entitlement, perpetuated by the items that Dimitrios mentioned. Other possible reasons:
It appeared to be in perpetual maintenance mode without significant updates.
Such software became less relevant with the advent of the iPhone and touch technology/paradigms.
If Google Photos doesn’t already have similar features, it will probably have them soon.
I don’t care so much about the Nik tools, but I couldn’t agree more on the quote in Pat’s post. This is the No. 1 reason for a tutorial being bad. The technical knowledge about what a tool does and how is the only thing persistent, everything else you would have to re-learn over and over and over again.
I regularly listen to some photography podcasts while driving to work, and the three most annoying things about these are
The percentage they talk about photography is too low and even decreasing, the topics are mainly gear and software, and, with software, I mean 99 photoshop/lightroom, 0.8 capture one, and 0.2 % affinity.
When talking about software, a lot is about installation problems, regressions in updates and things like that. That’s not photography. When they talk about features, it’s only about the names of the sliders and not the functionality: Slider A did not do what you want? Try pulling slider 2 to the right. No words about the what and how.
They explain many technical details simply wrong. E.g., just to make an example, they tell black frame subtraction is about getting rid of the noise. That hurts. It’s about getting rid of deterministic image errors that show up at long exposures, e.g. “hot pixels”, if I could get rid of noise by black frame subtraction I would turn this on at any shutter speed, but noise is per definition not deterministic. Maybe it is because people tend to call deterministic errors noise as well, but even then, they should explain it.
Unfortunately, this is not a problem of the podcasts only but the tutorials as well. And this affects both, free and proprietary software. It is IMO even worse for free software, since the total number of tutorials is much lower and therefore the total number of good tutorials is extremely low.
That being said, I did not contribute to tutorials a lot, therefore I am hardly allowed to rant. Sorry for the noise and other interference ;-).
One of the reasons I am part of this community. Unfortunately, family and other things to sort don’t permit much time. I do what I can. But only about 30 years till retirement ;).
Still free and all presets work perfectly fine via Shellout (in GIMP that is). Will add that I only toyed a bit with the NIK collection, but not long afterwards, went back to G’MIC again.
Yes, Pat and Dimitrios’s point is well taken, and is the philosophy I take when teach software to my students (GRASS GIS and QGIS, for example). I can also confirm that much of Nik technology has been put into Snapseed, and that the development team is active and responsive. They have responded to, and/or implemented several feature requests I’ve submitted on the Snapseed Google products forum. Yes, I know it’s not open source, but is a good free (monetary) tool for mobile post processing, and must admit to using it a lot.
I don’t know how it could compare with this Nik thing, but what about Thumbor? It’s a free (MIT) online editor with “smart on-demand image cropping, resizing and filters”. That being said, I never used it myself, though.
