Hello, I’m Robin Whalley. Welcome to Lenscraft. You might not
have paid much attention to it, but the Nik U Point technology, or Control Points as
their known, isn’t consistent across the Nik Collection. In today’s Bitesize Tutorial were going to demystify
U Points. And I’m going to show you how to master the Nik Control Point.
Whilst there are similarities across the Nik Collection, there are also differences in the way Control Points work.
To help make sense of this we’re going to look at Control Points in two of the Nik Collection plugins.
Nik Viveza and Nik Color Efex Pro.
Let’s start by opening our photo in Nik Viveza.
To add a new Control Point in Viveza we can click the Add Control Point button.
Or we can press Shift + Cmd + A on the keyboard.
Now when we click on the image the Control Point’s added.
We can see the selection made by the Control Point in one of two ways.
First, we can turn on the mask view in the Control Point list.
Alternatively, we can hold down the Cmd key.
Then as we move or resize the Control Point
we can see the mask.
The mask shows white where the Control Point is selecting an area. The selection is based on
a sample of the image from below this pin.
Where another area of the image has a similar tone or colour, it’s selected by the Control Point.
Notice that the mask extends beyond the area of the control point.
This is helping blend any adjustments with the rest of the image.
If we now move the Control Point onto a dark shadow, it also selects other dark areas.
Sometimes you don't want that to happen but you also don't want to reduce the size of the Control Point.
Here you can see that the pier and tower are also being selected
by this Control Point. The way to protect the area you don’t want to select is by adding another Control Point.
When you select that area with the Control Point it removes it from the selection the first Control Point was making.
If you need more Control Points, you can duplicate the Control Point by holding down the Option key whilst clicking and dragging.
When you have multiple Control Points
on an image you can adjust them individually or you can synchronise the adjustments.
To synchronise the adjustments, select all the Control Points you want to synchronise. You can do this by dragging out an area
with your mouse to include the Control Points you want to select. Or
you can select the Control Points in the Control Point list.
Hold down the Cmd key whilst selecting them in the list.
Now when you change one of the sliders, it changes that slider across all the selected Control Points.
The alternative to synchronising adjustments is to group the Control Points together. Select the Control Points you want to group.
Now click the Group button.
Now you only have one set of adjustment sliders on one of the Control Points in the Group.
You can also ungroup the Control Points by using the Ungroup button.
Now let’s take a look at Color Efex Pro where the Control Points work slightly different.
In Colour Efex Pro, each of the filters has its own set of Control Points you can apply to that filter.
We also have two types of Control Point button. These are marked with a '+' and '-' symbol. The + Control Point selects
an area to apply the filter to. And the – Control Point removes the area from the selection.
Watch what happens when I add a '+' Control Point, followed by a '–' Control Point.
You can see that one Control Point's making a selection, the '+' Control Point, whilst the other one is removing it from the selection.
and turning it black. When we come to position the Control Points as well we see another difference.
The shortcut Cmd key we used earlier to view the mask doesn’t work here.
If we want to view the mask, we need to use the tick box in the Control Point List.
But we can still duplicate the Control Points using the Option key and dragging them with the mouse.
At the top of the Control Point list you can see an Opacity slider. By default, when there’s no Control Points, this is set to 100%.
This applies the effect of the filter across the entire photo.
When we add a '+' Control Point, the Opacity slider will reduce to 0%.
This means the effect becomes hidden everywhere except where we've add the '+' Control Point.
If you look more closely at one of the Control Points, you can see it only has two adjustment sliders. One for the size
and the other is for the Opacity of the Control Point.
This means you can control the strength of the filter effect separately
for each of the Control Points. Although we’ve only looked at two of the plugins
from the Nik Collection, all the plugins use a variation on one of these
two approaches. When you master these, you'll master the U Point technology
across the Nik Collection. Thanks for watching and I hope you’ve found this tutorial helpful.
If you have, please like it and please share it with others. Don’t forget, I’m
also currently giving away free copies of my book “Lessons for Landscape
Photographers”. I’ll include the details of how to get this in the video description below.
I’m Robin Whalley. You’ve been watching Lenscraft. I’ll see you next week for another Bitesize Nik Tutorial.