Over the past few months, a number of us have written about the individual Nik Software plugins for Aperture. Ellen wrote about the Dfine noise reduction tool here, Micah wrote about Sharpener Pro here and Silver Efex Pro (for converting to black and white) here, and Dominique wrote about Viveza here. There's another great tool, which I'll talk about in a minute, called Color Efex Pro that lets you stylize your images further.

If you were to buy all of the tools, the total would come to over $1,000. However, Nik now sells a Complete Collection for Aperture for $299.95. I will admit that I don't purchase many programs for my computer because I just don't use them, but the Nik tools are definitely something I'd recommend purchasing for Aperture. There are 15 day trial versions available for each tool if you want to see for yourself.

Color Efex is a lot of fun to play around with! Do you remember the first time you discovered the Photoshop Filters menu and started trying Poster Edges with all of your images? It's kind of like that, but the results look a lot better. For instance, I was experimenting with the Thermal Infrared filter (which makes the background a dark blue and the subject appear in reds/yellows) and Bleach Bypass with some kiteboarding images. I thought Bleach Bypass looked really neat with the graphics in this kiteboard, but the rider's face was a bit dark. Within 10 seconds, I added a control point (the type with the minus next to it because I wanted to remove the effect), clicked on the rider's face, adjusted the size of the area it affected, and reduced the opacity so that everything blended nicely, and had a good-looking result.

However, there are very practical filters in Color Efex, too, especially the Graduated Filters and Graduated Neutral Density filters. As you might expect, Graduated Filters allows you to act like you held a colored, graduated filter in front of your lens. The controls let you adjust the filter's opacity, alignment, and blending, giving you far more flexibility than a piece of glass.

The Graduated Neutral Density filter is even more impressive, in my opinion. I always carry a 2-stop split ND filter with me when shooting, and I use it all the time. But it's a bit of a compromise--sometimes I want to tweak the tonalities of each side further. The Color Efex Graduated Neutral Density filter lets you adjust the tonalities separately with a slider as well as the positioning and rotation of the filter and how it blends in at the middle. Take a look at the next screenshot. The top image shows the before (which I shot in the field with a split ND), and the bottom shows the result after literally a minute of tweaking, where I made the top darker and the bottom a bit brighter. I think it's a lot more striking!

There are plenty of other filters to play around with, from the purely fun (Polaroid Transfer, Solarize, and Old Photo) to practical (Glamour Glow, Dynamic Skin Softener, Film Grain, and Darken/Lighten Center). Check out the package, and let me know what your favorite effects are!