Nik Software Announces Silver Efex Pro
Nik Software has announced an exciting new plugin for Aperture and Photoshop called Silver Efex Pro. Silver Efex Pro is, according to Nik, “the most advanced, complete, and straightforward black-and-white solution. Suggested retail price for the package is $199. For more information be sure to check out the Nik website at Nik Software or check out their press release by clicking here.
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11 Comments
Psychic Advice
July 13th, 2008
Thanks for the great info. I hope you’ll follow this with some more great content.
Andrew Miller
July 15th, 2008
I am trying the demo on Aperture 2.1 and Photoshop CS3 – Great with photoshop – 7 mins to load with Aperture – ouch!
Micah
July 15th, 2008
@Psychic Advice – I have a short article about this plugin over at Inside aperture, and we will be adding more in depth content here in the near future.
@Andrew – I have read some comments over at Inside Aperture regarding this plugin and performance. I haven’t had any trouble so far. It seems to perform about as fast as I would expect. But, others are having trouble. What type of graphics card do you have?
Micah
July 15th, 2008
Link to the Inside Aperture post – http://blogs.oreilly.com/aperture/2008/07/watch-out-silver-efex-is-addic.html
frank
July 17th, 2008
tried the demo on a 2,33 ghz mbp (with a x1600 grafic card) and 2 gb ram. enough for usually ervery app. but it lasts nearly 8 to 10 minutes to get a preview of a 12 mb pic in b/w. too long! the quality of the pics is finally really amazing, but it is no fun to work with. i’m waiting for 1.1 or 1.2…
Vidar
July 20th, 2008
Like Andrew and Frank – much to slow to open and save 12mb raw format pictures.
12 mb jpg and 6 mb raw are ok.
iMac 2 ghz intel core duo,2 gb RAM., radeon x1600.
John Taylor
July 28th, 2008
Odd re: performance issues, i’m try this out on a PBG4 1.67ghz with 1.5gb of RAM and whatever the stock graphics card was and do not have theproblems with load time describe above… sure its slow but 8 minutes!!?? I’m working with 12-17mb RAW files…
ANyway i love this plugin, i’m an old film guy, had a b&w darkroom for year.
Jeff Austin
August 5th, 2008
I’ve encountered the same problem on a MacPro w/ 8 Gig of Ram working on 10-12mb raw files. About 5 minutes to load. It usually opens fairly quickly the first time, but after closing the plug in and then relaunching it to work on another image, it is painfully slow and it gets worse each time. I suspect there is a bad memory leak in the plug-in and that is causing the problem. With 8G of Ram in my Mac Pro it should not have any problems.. I would love to buy it, I’m an old film guy too, and am very impressed with it, but this performance issue in Aperture is totally unacceptable.
Jeff Austin
August 13th, 2008
Nik released version 1.001 this week and they say it fixes the slow performance in Aperture. Early testing seems to confirm that not only is it fixed, it is now quite fast, just as fast or even faster than when launched from w/in photoshop. Looks like a must-have plug-in for those serious about b&w. Ordered my copy and should have it delivered today or tomorrow.
Tore Olsen
August 17th, 2008
I had huge performance issues with version 1 in Aperture. But, indeed, these have been solved completely in version 1.001. Thanks Jeff for the tip.
Kimi
August 18th, 2008
Depth of field is the major element to consider when choosing the best aperture for group portraits. Usually, sharp focusing in group portrait is challenging because it is not trivial to pose all the individuals in the same zone of focus.