As a frequent visitor of this site you might know that I’m not a big supporter of all kinds of post-processing tricks. If you want to add a certain effect to your photo, then use photographic means as much as possible to achieve this. Use gels to get a colour effect, move your camera during exposure to get a blur effect, and so on. Frank Doorhof calls this “why fake it if you can create it”. This doesn’t mean of course that you shouldn’t do any post-processing at all. If you shoot RAW you simply must! I use Nikon’s Capture NX2 for correcting contrast, colours, white balance, cropping, etc. Basically, that’s about it. The Capture NX2 product is developed by Nik Software, Inc. as an independent software vendor, although 49% of their shares are owned by Nikon. The product does a very good job at correcting your Nikon RAW (NEF) images, but out of the box it doesn’t provide much else. Nik Software does provide a number of add-on tools, but unfortunately they only plug-in to Adobe and Apple products, not to Capture NX2. There is one exception to this: Color Efex Pro 3.0! As the name suggests, a tool of 50+ effects to enhance the colour of your pictures. And it plugs in nicely to Capure NX2 as well. I’ve downloaded a trial version and have been playing around with it a bit. There is one particular effect I like very much. It’s called Glamour Glow. Instead of describing what it does, just click here to see some before and after images. Of course, all effects can be adjusted to you personal taste, but these examples are just as is.
Nik Software also produces a number of other tools, like Silver Efex Pro (for converting to and manipulating black and white images), HDR Efex and many more. Have a look for yourself at www.niksoftware.com. All other products work natively with Photoshop, Lightroom and Aperture.