Hi everyone,

I recently upgrade purchased DXO’s Nik Collection 9 which has been working just fine. All of a sudden it stopped working either standalone or as plugins, it just won’t load. I contacted their support and after repeatedly following their diagnostic suggestions including numerous uninstalls and reinstalls and running their NIK cleanup tool etc. and quite a few of my own including various graphics driver versions, virus and malware scans, removing any more recently installed software which might conflict, disabling antivirus, running SFC, DISM etc. and it still won’t work. Three days ago they told me that they’d escalated it to their developers since when I’ve not received any additional useful information. It’s very frustrating as the Nik Collection has always been one of my favourite pieces, if not my favourite piece of processing software. In addition to their diagnostic suggestions I have literally turned my computer upside down and inside out trying to resolve this and I have a great many years of computing experience.

So far I’m £150 out of pocket, something that I can ill afford and no closer to getting a working piece of software. I have told them politely to either fix it or give me my money back to which I’ve not yet had an answer. I don’t have this problem with any of my software, and I have a lot of software. Previous versions of Nik Collection have always worked just fine. I was thinking of updating my version of their Filmpack product after also recently updating my version of PureRAW but unless they can come up with a speedy solution I’m now more than having my doubts as to whether to buy any more DXO products in the future. This situation has dragged on for nearly a week and my patience is close to being exhausted. I’ve usually resolved issues like this by myself by now but this one is a real PITA and I’m beginning to think that their support people don’t care.

Kind regards

Leigh

Hi everyone,

Another shot taken the other day with my Lumix 12-32mm lens. As always, resizing down for my blog doesn’t do justice to the sharpness of the lens so I decided to include another 100% crop.

Kind regards

Leigh

Hi everyone,

As it was a sunny morning I went for a coffee and a stroll down the seafront here in Bognor. I wasn’t expecting to find anything new to photograph more a case of keeping exercising my legs. I took my Olympus E-PL8 and a Lumix 12-32mm lens in a small pouch that I picked up the other day in a charity shop for £2.50 🙂 which is very inconspicuous. I know that I’ve often waxed lyrical about this lens but I have to say that it’s an excellent tiny walkabout lens. Sure it’s made of plastic, it wouldn’t stand up to any real knocks, it has to be extended before using and it doesn’t have a manual focus ring but for all of that one simply can’t fault it’s image quality, size and weight (Approx. 70g/2.47 oz). If one picks one up used/split from a kit then as my American friends would say, its a great “bang for one’s buck” and a “no-brainer” 🙂 . I have two, they only differ in that one has a metal lens mount and the other is plastic not that that bothers me unduly.

I forgot to take my clip-on EVF for the camera and was very quickly reminded why I detest just having an LCD screen on a very bright day. I could see more of my reflection than what I was photographing, not so much a case of point and shoot as point and hope. One of my shots with only converging verticals correction as well as a 100% crop. In terms of image quality I think that this lens holds its own with many of my much more expensive lenses and that includes my prime lenses, the level of details is pretty phenomenal.

Kind regards

Leigh