Any way to use Nik Software under Linux?

Question

The only way I've found is to install Nik Software on Windows 7 in VirtualBox. The problem is that it's working really slow, though the host system is an Intel Core i7 with 8GB RAM, and all the other programs work fine in VirtualBox. Has anyone got a solution for this problem?

I use different versions of Kubuntu / KDE Neon.

Answer 1

I published a small open-source application for using Nik Collection plugins on Ubuntu. The app compiles both under Linux and Windows, but it is recommended to compile Windows version and use under wine. Pre-compiled binary is available for direct use. Project is hosted here: https://nik4nix.sourceforge.io

The app will talk to Nik plugins and to some other image editors on Linux for an integrated workflow. You can use it stand-alone to just load a photo and edit it with Nik. Then either save or export directly into gimp/pinta/darktable.

Will release more features related to integration with Picasa3, because IMHO this is the best photo manager that one can run on Linux, and I'd like to be able to use Nik Plugins from it via nik4nix.

Tested with wine version >=3. Some screens:

Answer 2

You can get VirtualBox to give the guest Windows OS access to the GPU via 2D and 3D acceleration.

On the VM you wish to use, right click to get the pop-up menu, select Settings, then Display. Click the radio boxes to Enable 3D Acceleration and Enable 2D Video Acceleration.

Answer 3

A quick search yield the following: http://www.evolware.org/?p=440

Though I wouldn't hold my breath - many photo-editing software uses the GPU and emulating that hasn't been Linux's strong suit.

Edit: steps copied from the site. Credit to Christian Pellegrin.

1) Install WINE of course. I use Arch Linux, which comes with extensive instructions. It really just boils down to pacman -S wine after you have enabled Multilib. An important trick is using Win32 mode which usually works better (I’m running other software, like AutoStakkert, Registax, WinJUPOS and Deep Sky Stacker without troubles in WINE with Win32). The link above goes into the details, basically you have set-up some environment variables before starting the Windows executable (I keep the Windows file system in a directory win32 under my home one):

export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/win32
export WINEARCH=win32

Also I use winecfg to select a Windows 7 personality. Also note at least WINE 1.8 is needed, 1.6 won’t work (thanks to Victor Lavaud who reported this and my wrong usage of auto-quotes).

2) Download the .exe installer and run it under wine, with the current version: wine nikcollection-full-1.2.11.exe. Be aware that there’s a bug (some API not entirely implemented or being confused by the spaces in filenames maybe) that will pop-up a window about the impossibility of writing a file (in the resource directory for each filter). The fix is easy, just create that directory and press the retry button. If you followed my convention about directories, the following commands will do the trick:

  mkdir -p "$HOME/win32/drive_c/users/Public/Application Data/Google/Analog Efex Pro 2/resource"
  mkdir -p "$HOME/win32/drive_c/users/Public/Application Data/Google/Color Efex Pro 4/resource"
  mkdir -p "$HOME/win32/drive_c/users/Public/Application Data/Google/Dfine 2/resource"
  mkdir -p "$HOME/win32/drive_c/users/Public/Application Data/Google/HDR Efex Pro 2/resource"
  mkdir -p "$HOME/win32/drive_c/users/Public/Application Data/Google/Sharpener Pro 3/resource"
  mkdir -p "$HOME/win32/drive_c/users/Public/Application Data/Google/Silver Efex Pro 2/resource"
  mkdir -p "$HOME/win32/drive_c/users/Public/Application Data/Google/Viveza 2/resource"

or replace win32 with your wine directory (the default is .wine which I find a bit confusing being normally hidden).

3) You should be able to to use the plug-ins standalone. This makes a lot of sense, for example, for the HDR one: you should feed it the RAW pictures with adequately different exposure times. In this case just run: wine "$HOME/win32/drive_c/Program Files/Google/Nik Collection/HDR Efex Pro 2/HDR Efex Pro 2.exe". On a just partially related note: I’m not sure NEF Nikon RAW files can be opened directly (I tried to install the Microsoft Camera Codec Pack in WINE but no luck) but you can always create a linear 16bpp TIFF from the RAW file using dcraw.

Anyway it is much simple to just use the filters as plugin for GIMP, so I customized the ShellOut GIMP plugin. Grab the modified version of ShellOut.py and put it into ~/.gimp-2.8/plug-ins. A new menu entry ShellOut… should appear under the Script-Fu menu. When you activate it you should be given the choice of running any of the available plug-ins on the current layer or a copy of it. You should consider 2 customizations to ShellOut.py:

• The already mentioned top-level WINE directory that might be different than win32.
• The file you use for the exchange. I use tif because, in the newest, right now still experimental, GIMP 2.9.2 it supports floating point pixel depth (for this version of GIMP the plug-in directory moved to ~/.config/GIMP/2.9/plug-ins). There are 2 caveats: it is a bit slower and you get some annoying error messages about some TIFF flags not being supported. To mitigate the later problem, you can dock an error console, so the messages won’t be impacting. But, if you don’t care about high pixel depth just use png instead of tif: it is pretty faster.