A Follow up on Nik Collection 4 - A Problem with Capture One
Just a quick follow up on the recently released Nik Collection 4, which I posted about recently. Since its release I’ve been trying out the various applications, with the intent of writing a review, specifically of Silver Efex Pro, which is the main application I use in the suite. Since the release, and my initial post, I’ve noticed a couple of things.
Update to get improved speed
First of all, something positive. I noted in my initial post, that Silver Efex Pro seemed a little slow on the M1 Macs. Since then there has been a new release, and the new version improves the speed noticeably in my opinion. You should get a notification when you launch any of the applications, but you can also get the update by going to the help menu and choosing “Check for update”. The latest version of the suite is 4.0.8. While there is still room for improvement, I think it’s definitely better than the previous initial release.
Capture One Problems
Unfortunately it’s not all good news. There seems to be a major issue with using the software as an external editor with Capture One. While this worked seamlessly with the previous version, the new software doesn’t seem to want to work with Capture One. You can send an image to the application with no issues, however when you click “apply” to save it out, it doesn’t save. It puts up a progress bar, but nothing is saved.
What’s worse, it won’t save even if Capture One is open in the background. I’ve read some reports of this happening with other applications too, but the biggest issue seems to be with Capture One. I tried to contact their customer support about this and got a slightly ridiculous response:
“Unfortunately, we have never supported the use of our software with Capture One. Should it have worked in the past, we recommend contacting Capture One to see if they plan on adding compatibility with our new version as well.”
This is absurd, as its an external application that is simply having an image passed to it. It’s not running as a plug in, it’s running as an independent application. It’s effectively the same as dragging and dropping, and shouldn’t be an issue. I pointed this out the the support rep, as well as the fact that Capture One running in the background prevents the application from saving, and they responded by saying that it is not something they intend to fix as if there is an issue it's Capture One's fault and I should contact Capture One.
Ok then.
I know form the past that support reps don’t always know what’s going on in a company and aren’t always the best representatives, so I will give them a chance, but that wasn’t exactly the best communication to be putting forward. I’m tech savvy enough to know that this is a problem with their software, not Capture One, and passing the buck like that is kind of patronising, but anyway.
(By the way, I normally wouldn't post a support response like this, but lots of others seem to be getting the same canned response and it's already been published elsewhere)
I have a request in to the Company’s PR devision for comment, so I’ll withold judgement until I hear back from someone. I suspect this will be fixed, as it’s popping up in several places including their own forums.
So what do you do? Well, there are a couple of workarounds.
First of all, someone on my Facebook group pointed out that if you have DXO photo lab running in the background it fixes the problem with Silver Efex and Capture One, which is also kind of ridiculous.
The more practical solution is to send your image to Photoshop first and then run Silver Efex or whatever plug-in you want from there. Unfortunately this means that if you’re running on an M1 Mac, you need to run Photoshop in Rosetta mode for this to work.
Either way, I hope this gets resolved soon. I’m frankly annoyed at the responses I got from customer support, but I’ve also dealt with enough customer support reps to know that crappy customer support responses is not uncommon. Any correspondence I’ve had with the company in the past has been positive and productive, so I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt for now. If I hear back from the higher ups I will let you know.
P.s. Thanks to everyone on my Facebook group that helped out with feedback on this problem
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