Legacy Nik and Photoshop CC

Toby Webster

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I've finally been forced out of CS6 on one of my PCs due to a reset, and have reluctantly gone over to the subscription version on that machine. So far not so keen. My graphics processor is marked as being incompatible due apparent lack of DirectX and 'Insufficient VRAM' of which I have 0mb of the 1500mb required.

Leaving that aside for a moment, I have successfully placed my old Nik folders in the Adobe Plugins folder, and Nik appears in the 'Filters' drop down menu. When I open a file and summon SilverEfex (or ColorEfex) from the drop down, the relevant screen comes up. However, when I've made my adjustments in Nik and press 'Okay' the Nik interface drops away as normal, but the original file remains unchanged, and there is no Nik layer there.

The Nik software panel also fails to appear. At the moment I have only placed SilverEfex and ColorEfex into the Adobe plugins file holder.

Any thoughts?
 
I can only think it is lack of resource Toby. The subscription version of PS is very much larger than CS6 and accordingly needs more grunt. I am still using the legacy version of NIK with the latest iteration of PS and it works perfectly. However, I have a lot of RAM in both the graphics card and in the computer itself.
 
I've got 8GB of RAM on this machine (with another 8GB on the way) but the graphics card may well be an issue. I don't have a clue what I should do about that - I've tried updating the driver software, but it seems to be a graphics card that is not recognised by the manufacturer (AMD Radeon 6450). Its a Dell PC and I suspect is a proprietary version.
 
I suspect that you are right. 16GB RAM should be plenty but PS uses the graphics processor for some of its functions. I assume that your desktop uses a graphics card, not the motherboard's on board graphics. All graphics cards have some memory but It might well need more graphics memory than you currently have. If so the only solution is a new card. One thing that might be worth trying is reloading your NIK apps from the original download if you have it. I'm not sure that just placing the files into the ADOBE plugins file is enough. You may not be making the necessary links to your operating system but I'm not savvy enough to know for sure.
 
After reading some bits and bobs on the adobe forum I've found that there is some function if you go to the settings in the Nik panel after you've made the adjustments and choose 'apply to existing layer'. This works, but it obviously means that you need to manually add a new layer to your file prior to opening the Nik filter to avoid the process being destructive.

There is also still no Nik menu panel on the PS interface, you have to drop down the 'filters' menu. This may be related to the version of Nik that I've got, it seems that it may not be fully functional prior to Google Nik Version 2, though this experience does not seem to be uniform amongst users.

So in short it works, but far from properly.
 
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