Nik Software – the makers of fantastic photo editing tools – just released a brand new release of their Color Efex Pro product. Version 4. That is, it’s not quite released yet, but you can pre-order it on their website. I immediately started to read the feature list on their site. It really got me excited. Good stuff! About to pre-order. It’s compatible with Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture and…..what? No Capture NX2 support. This could not be true and I asked Nik Software what I had to do to get a CNX2 compatible version. Here’s their response:
“We are very sorry here:
The Capture NX 2 software from Nikon does not support Nik Software’s new Color Efex Pro 4 plug-in. Color Efex Pro 4 is built on an entirely new and powerful framework and thus requires certain functions of the plug-in architecture of the host application that are not currently present in Captures NX 2.
If you are a current Color Efex Pro 3.0 customer, you can of course continue to enjoy the benefits of that software with Capture NX 2.
Regarding plans to make the two products work together, the effort to update Color Efex Pro 4 to function within Capture NX 2 relies on Nikon’s future plans and development for their photo editing software.”
Nikon’s future plans and development for their photo-editing software. So this means that Nik Software is not involved in these plans or not aware of them. Nikon is apparently defining its own course without Nik Software being consulted. I do not know this, of course, but it seems to be the case based on the answer. So let’s assume for a moment it is true and Nikon and Nik Software are each going their own way, then yes, a next version of Capture NX is out of the question. Such a wonderful tool and still no future. So it seems…
This is bizarre. I downloaded a trial of Color Efex pro 3 for NX-2 and when the trial expired I tried to find some way to order it. Finally I went to the Nik site and found that 3 was no longer available and that 4 was only compatible with the other programs.
Is Nikware notthe software arm of Nikon or what?
Just when I was getting comfortable with NX as my standard post processor they look like they’re getting ready to phase it out?