Dune Texture by Christopher Mowers on 500px.com

 

The Nik Collection is Free! The Nik Collection is Free! I’m so glad that I didn’t buy it.

For those of you who do not know what I am talking about, the Nik Collection is a suite of half a dozen plugins/applications that specialize in making various aspects of photo editing easier or faster. Most people use them as a plugin in Lightroom or Photoshop, but they can also be used as standalone programs.

Initially, the cost to own the full suite was $499. Google aquired the Nik Collection as part of a larger software acquisition and the price went to $149. A few weeks ago, they made it completely free, and issued refunds to everyone who had purchased the product in 2016.

If you are just getting into photography and are not ready to put up the cash for Adobe Creative Cloud, I would consider starting with the Nik collection; do your basic adjustments in Viveza and then move into the other applications for more specialized tasks. It is no replacement for the Adobe products, but it would be a fun way to get into editing your photos.

You can download the Nik Collection for free here: https://www.google.com/nikcollection/

About the Photo:
Ashleigh and I were off work last week and took several little day drips. This picture comes from our visit to Silver Lake State Park. Silver Lake is a big Michigan destination for ORV and dune buggies, and is really quite a fascinating site to see.

I used Color Efex Pro 4 (Nik Collection) to get the detail in the sand. I applied radial blur into some of the cloud highlights to emphasize the beaming down of light that was already somewhat present in my initial capture. I combined these layers and my edited raw file in photoshop using layer masking.

Camera Gear:
Nikon D3100 with 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 lens.

Date Taken:
April 1, 2016

Thank you for reading. You can see my best work on 500px and can also find pictures of the “trying my hardest to be good at this” type on Flickr or Pixoto.

Also, be sure to like the Go See Do Facebook Page, and follow Ashleigh on Instagram and Flickr! Check out our Gear page to see inside our camera bag!