Photo software News: Nik Software Anniversary, Capture One News and Photoshop M1 Beta
There’s been a few bits of photo software news over the past few days, so I’ve distilled them down into one quick post! Nik Software is celebrating its 25th anniversary, you can now get a free upgrade to Capture One 21 if you buy version 20, and Photoshop is already out in beta for Apple Silicon Macs
Nik Software 25th anniversary
Yesterday, Nik Software celebrated its 25th anniversary. Now owned by DXO labs, the company has released a new update to coincide with the release. Here’s what the press announcement says:
To celebrate its 25th anniversary, the Nik Collection, the famous photo plugin suite for Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom Classic, and DxO PhotoLab and the winner of the 2020-2021 EISA Award for Best Photo-Editing Software, released its latest 3.3 version. This version includes a pack of 25 brand-new Presets for Color Efex Pro and Silver Efex Pro. These twenty-five exclusive Presets are divided into five series, each with five Presets: “Classic Portrait Color,” “Classic Portrait Black & White,” “Light & Bright,” “Wildlife,” and “Street”. This update is also compatible with macOS Big Sur and the 2021 versions of Adobe’s host applications.
You can find out more details here:
Capture One 21 Now a free upgrade if you buy Version 20
I you are looking to get into Capture One, you will now get a free upgrade to version 21 when it is release, if you buy version 20 now. They are also still offering discounts to owners of previous versions who pre-order the upgrade, and this includes a free upgrade to 21 for owners of version 12 and earlier.
They also showed off a handful of the forthcoming new features recently, although this hasn’t gone down too well, as the general consensus is that people are very underwhelmed by the announced features. I’m to going to get into it too much here, but I will point out, that they stated in the video that they weren’t showing everything, and that they may do more reveals in the future. So what they showed is not the entire set of new features. While they clarified that several times in the video, that fact seems to have gotten lost in the aftermath.
I realise that this whole upgrade announcement, and the preorder offers have been really badly received this year, even thought they did the same thing last year. I’ve been getting nasty hate mail about it for even discussing it.
I’m just sharing the details for those interested, so don’t shoot the messenger. If you’re unhappy with how Capture One has handled this, and you’re on a perpetual license, you don’t need to upgrade if it bothers you that much, or you don’t feel the upgrade is worth it. Unlike the Adobe suite, you don’t need to keep paying, and your current version will keep working. You can skip an upgrade and get the next one and so on. For those on subscription, you will get the upgrade anyway, so its not an issue there.
Personally, while I think this could have been handled better by the company, I’ll still be upgrading myself, but that is just my opinion.
Photoshop Beta
Hot on the heels of Apple releasing its new M1 Macs last week, many companies have been porting their software to support the new processors. While some companies have full release versions available, Adobe has so far only issued a beta for Photoshop which you can find under the pre-release tab of the creative cloud application (although I think you need to be on a M1 Mac for it to appear)
You should be warned though, that currently, it is very beta. Many functions are not supported, including Camera RAW, so if you use Photoshop for developing your images, this will be an issue. For the moment you may be better off using the rosetta version, but if you wanted to try it, the option is there.
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