To make a change, just grab the slider from this menu and drag it. With the old version of Viveza, clicking a control point brought up a mini-menu, making it dead easy to adjust the image: Using this ‘U-Point’ technology is so easy and you can create sophisticated editing masks with it. You can add as many control points as you like and group multiple points. The control points create an intelligent mask, enabling selective editing of the image. Here is what the control point above has selected: This is used to add selection points to your image, and these work magically.

The only thing wrong with the interface was it is not resizable. First, here are the differences in the old and new interfaces: Viveza – Old Interface And some make me wonder if anyone at DXO actually uses the product, as they make the product harder to use. Some things are definitely better – it offers a full screen display. It’s useful if you don’t own DXO Viewpoint but redundant if you do. This addition adds the functionality of DXO Viewpoint to Nik.

Last year, they added Perspective Efex to the package. Since acquiring NIK in 2017, DXO have released various upgrades that fixed bugs and improved compatibility with tools such as Affinity Photo. They have now released the latest update to the NIK Collection – a suite of excellent tools for image enhancement, noise removal, sharpening, HDR and perspective correction. I praised DXO’s last Photo Lab release, because it contained a decent set of extra features. Skylum has re-released Luminar as Luminar AI and added very little to it, if truth be told. Since that post, Topaz have (controversially) switched their most popular products to a perpetual license but you have to pay to receive updates after a year. But it’s hard to keep adding additional features to mature products… Back in 2019, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek post entitled Is This The End For Photo Software Companies? where I argued that software houses not offering subscriptions were under pressure to release ‘new’ versions of their software annually, in order to keep the money flowing in.

Nik collection 4 upgrade price