Custom Presets changed in Silver FX 3

Upon upgrading to Nik 4 I noticed all of my custom presets in Silver Efex have changed and now have a faded “matte” look to them instead of the nice clean contrasty styles I originally had. It is almost like DXO added some new setting in SE3 and it applied itself to all of my custom presets. Any thoughts on this? I’d rather not have to recreate all my custom presets.

I had high hopes when DXO acquired Nik Collection, but I have to say with each paid upgrade I feel a bit of buyers remorse. (I also get somewhat frequent crashing and losing changes when I click apply in Photoshop 2021, MacOS 11.6, 2019 iMac i9.)

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Do you still have access to your presets under Nik 3? On another computer, for example, or maybe you exported them at some point? Or even from a previous backup with TimeMachine? If so, delete the presets in SEP3 and re-import them from your backup. This is at least worth a try.
It’s always a good idea to export your presets before an upgrade and import them again afterwards. That’s how I do it every time without any problems.
I have to say, though, that I don’t use Photoshop.

After comparing the SEP3 settings to my old settings in SEP2 I found that SEP3 is forcing the Kodak 400 TMAX Pro film profile on any custom preset that I import, and that is causing the fade/matte look I was getting. My custom presets had no film profile set so this seems to be a bug in the the new version.

Thanks for the suggestions. I did have SEP2 in a TimeMachine backup and was able to open that, export the custom presets, and then import them into SEP3. Oddly it still shows up flatter looking than in SEP2. I had both version open side by side with the same image and same preset and SEP2 has more contrast than it does in SEP3. Very strange.

I guess I’ll have to go through each setting to see if there is something different in the new version that is causing this. Or just create my own presets in Lightroom and give up on Nik.

On the same computer?

Yes, same computer & monitor.

When I first switched over to SFX3 I found some differences in the way some sliders adjust the images. I can’t remember exactly which ones but I think the Soft Contrast slider was one of them. This could be a factor.

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