I am wondering if someone can walk me through how they use the Nik suite in their workflow of editing landscape images. I really like the results I get in Lightroom 4 and feel comfortable using it. Would I use the Nik software after all of my adjustments in Lightroom 4? Can I do things with the software that I can't in Lightroom (specifically with the color efex and silver efex programs)?
Thanks!
SilverFX gives lots of nice presets (with plenty of modification sliders and switches) that make it a breeze to convert to nice B&W images. It would take a long time and be a real pain to do it using LR alone. They give so many different conversion types and it also can provide silver halide-like grain to varying degrees.
ColorFX pre-CS6 was really important. Since CS6 and the much more powerful sliders in ACR, I don't need to use it nearly as much, but there are still times I need to use it for sure so it is still pretty important since you still sometimes need to quickly isolate some fancy manipulations on certain regions and color tones/levels. It would be really a time consuming PITA, MAJORLY, to replicate what you can do with it in a jiffy.