Abraham Valley, Cannock Chase

It was an act of faith to pop out this morning for a walk, it was raining as we left home and hail had been coming down only minutes earlier.  We made the right decision with beautiful conditions throughout our walk (though there was a keen wind!).

This is an area of the Chase I've only just started to explore.  Abraham Valley comes up from Seven Sisters and is a 2 km uphill stretch to one of the highest points in the area.  This is looking back from the head of the valley.

I used Nik Silver Efex Pro to increase the contrast in the sky (using a black and white layer as a luminosity mask).  I had some problems; the latest version of Photoshop  CC2018 crashed each time I clicked OK in Efex Pro to return the filtered layer back into the program.  Some research identified a lot of disgruntled people filling up the forums.  I have found a work around for those who like to use these plugins (it doesn't appear to affect its use with Lightroom Classic CC).

You have two possibilities:

1. If you have Lightroom, you can create your layer first and then import the two files as layers in Photoshop.

2. If you don't you need to duplicate the layer you want to apply the plugin to.  Open the plugin and then go to settings, select "After clicking OK' and change the drop down menu to 'Apply the filter to the current layer'.  Click OK to come out of settings.

When you click on OK to return to Photoshop it should not crash (though you won't have a layer mask applied to the Efex Pro layer).

Hope that might help some people, I know the Nik Collection is popular with some of us here.  I have contacted DXO who have recently acquired the NIK collection but they aren't as yet in a position to provide support.