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Google Nik collection now available for free

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Re: Google Nik collection now available for free

#21

Post by _delirium »

themartorana wrote: post #17
gfody wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a travesty. Someday we will look back and see the whole web application trend as a technological plague that wiped out great native desktop applications replacing them with inferior web versions that nobody actually wanted.

Google Photos is amazing, superior, and everything I've wanted for years. Seriously.

I don't hate it, but a big problem for me is that the editing seems to produce quite low-quality output, at least in the Android app (maybe it's better if you use the web version?). For the use-case of cropping/editing photos and sharing low-res versions on Twitter it's not very noticeable, but I was very surprised when I looked at one of my edited photos in higher res and it had a bunch of really grating artifacts, that weren't in either the original, or a similar edit reproduced in gimp.

Re: Google Nik collection now available for free

#22

Post by Gratsby »

The Nikon Collection was a significant piece of software - it used to be a pretty penny for all of them too.

It was much more productive than photoshop, and did some things that just aren't easy to do in PS.

I don't know how google got a hold of it, but it's a great thing for photographers.

Re: Google Nik collection now available for free

#23

Post by salimmadjd »

Google acquired Nik for their mobile photo app Snapped in 2012 [1]

They got the Nik software along with it. At the time each of the tools were sold separately for $100-some (don't exactly remember). Eventually google combined them and priced them together as one package. Today they decided to give it away for free.

As someone else mentioned, it's unclear if it means google will stop developing it or if they opened it up to get more users and use it as a research tool to gather more data on type of filters users use and how they use them. So eventually to apply that to some type of automated filtering solution for android and/or Google photos.

[1] http://mashable.com/2012/09/17/google-acquires-snapseed/

Re: Google Nik collection now available for free

#25

Post by guelo »

themartorana wrote: post #17
gfody wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a travesty. Someday we will look back and see the whole web application trend as a technological plague that wiped out great native desktop applications replacing them with inferior web versions that nobody actually wanted.

Google Photos is amazing, superior, and everything I've wanted for years. Seriously.

You obviously haven't tried to paginate quickly browsing through thousands of photos.

Re: Google Nik collection now available for free

#26

Post by gfody »

themartorana wrote: post #17
gfody wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a travesty. Someday we will look back and see the whole web application trend as a technological plague that wiped out great native desktop applications replacing them with inferior web versions that nobody actually wanted.

Google Photos is amazing, superior, and everything I've wanted for years. Seriously.

I couldn't disagree with you more, Google Photos is garbage compared to Picasa. There's no folders and no tags (for writing a quick description that applies to a bunch of pictures), no manual face tagging (for when the magic fails, or tagging pets, or tagging people that were there but not in the photo, or just tagging things that aren't faces), no people pane (where you can select two or more people to quickly see all the photos of them together), no batch editing of any kind really, no bulk mechanism to give your feedback to the facial recognition engine to help it learn (did Google Photos perfect that technology? Is that why it doesn't need our help anymore? No. It just misses half the faces Picasa would've caught)

In lieu of these basic requirements, Photos presumes to be able to create collages automatically for me (sure put all those pictures that are basically identical together) and albums (oh yes call that one "Trip to California" it's not like I don't fucking live in California). Not to mention all of this is happening in a browser that is clearly sweating to scroll hundreds of thumbnails across my screen where Picasa would effortlessly zoom and resize on the fly.

I honestly don't see how Photos could ever deliver a superior user experience to Picasa without first abandoning the idea that it's all going to happen in a browser. I'm also curious what your use-case is that Photos is actually superior to Picasa in your opinion, are you a heavy user?

Re: Google Nik collection now available for free

#27

Post by jmathai »

gfody wrote: post #26
themartorana wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Photos is amazing, superior, and everything I've wanted for years. Seriously.

I couldn't disagree with you more, Google Photos is garbage compared to Picasa. There's no folders and no tags (for writing a quick description that applies to a bunch of pictures), no manual face tagging (for when the magic fails, or tagging pets, or tagging people that were there but not in the photo, or just tagging things that aren't faces), no people pane (where you can select two or more people to quickly see a…

This is how Google Photos fits into my overall workflow. I absolutely love it but it's not the most important or critical piece.

https://medium.com/@jmathai/my-automated-photo-workflow-usin...

Re: Google Nik collection now available for free

#28

Post by arjie »

gfody wrote: post #13
pgodzin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Picasa is dead, Google Photos is the primary photo product

Such a travesty. Someday we will look back and see the whole web application trend as a technological plague that wiped out great native desktop applications replacing them with inferior web versions that nobody actually wanted.

Right now I see it as a technological boon that ensures that I have access to software irrespective of my OS platform. That used to matter so much previously. Now it doesn't, and that's great.

Re: Google Nik collection now available for free

#29

Post by stan_rogers »

bribri wrote: post #19

Hoping for Google Photos integration...

That would require a lot of work. There are parts, at least, of the Nik collection that use deep hooks into Photoshop; it's not just a set of typical 8BA/8BF "give me a pointer to a TIFF I can play with" plugins.
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