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. Color Efex Pro’s filters are still in the left sidebar, but those being used for the current effect are highlighted by a vertical orange bar. What’s new in Nik Collection 5 (and Color Efex Pro 5) is the way that all this is presented. 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. I promise you, the longer you spend with it, the more impressed you will be. And yet Color Efex Pro is a remarkable set of filters and tools that never stops surprising you. Color Efex Pro is one of the older plug-ins in the DxO Nik Collection and until Nik Collection 5 it was the plug-in where least had changed.

Nik color efex pro