How Nik's Color Efex Pro does that?

<p>Does anyone know what Photoshop techniques are behind Nik's Detail Extractor?</p>

<p>From your question, it sounds like you believe that Nik's Detail Extractor is a "Photoshop action", ie, a series of steps, each of which uses the tools build in to Photoshop. This is not the case. It's a full-fledged "plugin". They use their own algorithms and then wrap them with a nice user interface.</p>

<p>OTOH, one could ask how you might approximate the results of the Nik Detail Extractor using only Photoshop's native tools.</p>

<p>A good start would be to:</p>

<p>a) duplicate your image onto a new layer. Set the blend mode to darken;</p>

<p>b) run USM (unsharp masking) on that layer with a low opacity and fairly large radius (say, 10-50 pixels);</p>

<p>The result won't be exactly the same, but it will be a step in the right direction. Some of the obvious differences between the two techniques that you will likely see will be that the Nik software automatically keeps the average brightness and overall/global contrast roughly contrast, and automatically adjusts the radius for whatever size image you feed it.</p>

<p>HTH,</p>

<p>Tom M</p>

<p><em>This is not the case. It's a full-fledged "plugin"</em><br /> <br>

Oh, yes I expected that. I've been doing the HIRLOAM enhancing for a long time. I was just curious as a lot of magic is pure Photoshop. Seems like this is not one of them.<br>

The Detail Extractor is pretty imressive.</p>

<p>NIK's tonal contrast tool - used judiciously - is also remarkably useful at complexify-ing up an image on the hairy edge of blown out details.</p>

<p>Hi Geoff - You can get pretty close with just the native tools in PS. Here's a snapshot I took at a museum a couple of years ago. First the original.</p>

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<p>Here it is using the "Detail Extractor" in the NIK Color Efx Pro package.</p><div></div>

<p>And here it is using only tools available in Photoshop - no plugins, no actions, no add-ons.</p>

<p>My procedure consisted of:</p>

<p>1. First lowering the contrast significantly with two Brightness/contrast adjustment layers. (not legacy)</p>

<p>2. Next, r=6 USM. </p>

<p>3. Then another contrast lowering adjustment layer. </p>

<p>4. Then an r=2 USM step.</p>

<p>5. Then another contrast lowering adjustment layer.</p>

<p>6. Then a final touch up with a levels and a vibrance/sat adjustment layers.</p>

<p>Note: To target the results to mostly the midtones I used the opacity and blend-if sliders on practically every layer in the stack except the 1st and the last.</p>

<p>As you can see, spending a bit of $$$ to get a convenient, "one-click" plugin has a lot going for it. ;-)</p>

<p>HTH,</p>

<p>Tom M</p>

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<p>You are right about the convenience of using one-step plug-ins. Your version while very impressive is a bit crunchier than the Nik version.</p>

<p>But, still good to know that one can still get pretty close to the plug-in result. I don’t care too about much to the Color Pro filters, but the Detail Enhancer is a sweet deal. Provided it is not overused/over cranked.</p>

<p>Thank you Tom</p>

<p> </p>

<p>You're welcome, Geoff. You're absolutely right that my version is crunchier. It took much longer to write up the description than it took me to do the work (2 or 3 min). Since it was only a little, free, proof of concept demo to illustrate the sort of approach needed, if I had decided to spend a bit more time on the project, I'm sure I could have dialed it in so that the two were almost indistinguishable, but what's the point, it's clearly a case where spending a bit of money is well worth it for most people.</p>

<p>WRT the other filters in the package, if you are like me, you may find that they grow on you. Even something as simple as a grad ND -- its obvious how to get close to their version of a grad ND using only PS tools, yet the convenience and time-saving of having a few, easily tweakable sliders instead of having to do it <em>de novo</em> each time can be very attractive. </p>

<p>Cheers,</p>

<p>Tom M</p>

<p>I’ll take your advice and will try to make friends w/ the other filters. I might experiment w/ some of the soft focus ones as I never been satisfied w/ any of the previous softening methods I tried. I don’t need it often, but it would be nice when I do.</p>