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Working with Plugins in Adobe Photoshop

Topaz & The Nik Collection

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Introduction

Join professional nature photographer Nic Stover to discover ways we can improve the quality of our images using Topaz and the Nik Collection. These programs are designed to supplement the capabilities within Photoshop and in many cases will do a better job improving your image quality than Lightroom or Photoshop alone.

This course include access to the course materials and workflow, 9 lessons to follow along with. 

This class is not about how to use some advanced AI program to change your skies, or one stop presets that make your images look like magic.  It is about two programs that I use that dramatically improve my processes, increase the sharpness of my images, and enable me to print with more detail. 

This class will cover how I use Topaz Labs and the Nik Collection.  You can use this link https://topazlabs.com/ref/1256/ to get 15% off when you use the code FRIEND15

Session Details

What is Topaz Labs?  

Topaz Labs is based out of Dallas and has consistently been implementing very targeted AI (Artificial Intelligence) not designed to replace parts of your image with scenes that did not exist rather to reduce noise, sharpen, and help you to scale your images to larger sizes.

They do this through 3 main offerings.  DeNoise AI, Sharpen AI, and GigaPixel AI. 

  • DeNoise-Eliminate even the most severe noise and recover crisp detail in your images.
  • Sharpen-Recover from missed focus, lens softness, and motion blur to achieve tack-sharp images.
  • GigaPixel-Upscale and enhance any image by up to 600% while perfectly preserving image quality.

What is the NIK Collection?

The other plugin I want to demonstrate and answer questions on is the NIK Collection from DXO.  DXO has been at this for a long time, selling their company to Google and then eventually buying it back.  There plugin pack has 6 main plugins. 

  • Nik Viveza – Adjust Colors and tonality
  • Nik Color Efex – Color filters and creative effects
  • Nik Silver Efex – Black & White Photography
  • Nik HDR Efex – Tone mapping
  • Nik Sharpener – Output sharpener
  • Nik DFine – Noise Reduction

Part of the reason I like both programs, is they work in BOTH Lightroom and Photoshop as plugins, but they can ALSO be used as standalone programs.  Meaning that you can use them regardless of your workflow process unlike many others that only work as a standalone program or in one OR the other. 

 

Session Details

In this class we will review the following items:

  1. Enabling these programs within Lightroom and Photoshop.
  2. Image demonstrations for each of these add ins showing what they do and how I use them in my workflow.
  3. Image review of what I look for and when I might the choice to use a plugin vs the native features within Lightroom or Photoshop.
  4. How to work on an image within Lightroom, Photoshop, or as a standalone image directly in the program.

Details

 Giveaways / Takeaways: A reference sheet showing my workflow for each of the Topaz add ins and a summary of what the specific tools do.  For example, I will list out the filters under Color Efex that I use from time to time, what they do, and why you might want to use them. 

 

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