Scenes of Vermont Forums

All,

onOne (a software vendor whose stuff I do like) has offered two items for free.

One is a free version of their Perfect Effects 3. Not a full version but hey, it is free:

http://www.ononesoftware.com/products/p ... ects-free/

The second is a full version of their Perfect Layers 2. This one comes with the above free version of Perfect Effects 3. The released them seperately for customers like me who they screwed by letting me buy Perfect Layers a couple of months ago for $80... Yeah, a little bitter about this. Kind of makes me not want to buy something from them in the future if I know I might have just gotten it free later had I waited... Anyway, here is a link to that for you freeloaders :

http://www.ononesoftware.com/products/s ... ayers/?ind

Yeah, I am not sure I "get" that marketing strategy. Lets piss off our regular paying customers. I got inundated with all the "wonderful" once in a lifetime, this is your last chance offers from One One and finally spammed them out. I'll do my own layers, thank you

They have a few things that I like but, the ever increasing tools that Adobe is including with LR and PS are making these third party apps more and more irrelevant.

Perfect Effects is nice but, as I find a group of settings I like for different image types in LR, I can apply my own "effects" pretty quickly.

Then again, were I a pro with tons of photos to process (as opposed to my slacker amateur status with tons of photos to process...) maybe this would make a lot more sense.

Don't get me wrong, I will take "free" but otherwise, I would rather devote any future On One purchases (or really any other add-on purchases, for that matter) toward my buying my copy of the end-all be-all that is PS.

I guess I'll back away, partly, from my original "knee-jerk" response to this thread (especially, the "I'll make my own layers, thank you" line). After viewing some of the results my friend, Rich, obtained, with little PS knowledge, using his suite of Nik software, I thought I needed to take a closer look.

After speaking with James Moore, teacher and mentor extraordinaire, and learning that he uses several of the Nik tools consistently in his own workflow, I was beyond intrigued and have now actually purchased Nik Viveza (I know Al and Carol both use it, too). I have held off on the Color Efex (from what I can tell, it is essentially a set of photo filters) and their noise reduction product "dFine," but there is some likelihood that I will eventually succumb to them too .

My dad raised me to be a traditionalist, I guess and learn how to use the basic tool yourself (in this case, the basic tool would be Photoshop). But what I have learned is twofold: (1) there is technology that is over and above what you can "hand-manipulate" in PS (Nik uses something called "U-point" technology to create very intelligent selections and layers - something which I cannot begin to understand, much less explain). But I can observe it and its pretty impressive!

I'll start a thread here on my Viveza adventures.

Just an FYI that a free version of Perfect Effects 4 is now available:

http://www.ononesoftware.com/products/p ... dium=email

It lacks the ability to build your own presets and comes with far fewer effects but is free so might be worth a look.