DxO, has announced the acquisition of the Nik Collection Photoshop plugins from Google. They plan to continue development of the Nik Collection with a new “Nik Collection 2018 Edition” planned for mid-next year. The current version will remain available for free on DxO’s website. They will require your email so they can market to you, but if you don’t already have Nik it’s a reasonable price to pay.
In May, Google announced that they will no longer offer updates the Nik Collection, so it is positive to hear that Nik will continue to evolve. However, the next update will probably not be free, hinted Aravind Krishnaswamy, an Engineering Director with Google.
You can get Nik for free here.
About Dxo
Dxo’s flagship product is PhotoLab, a stand-alone program that allows you to remove noise, get rid of light constraints, recover color details, apply sophisticated optical corrections, and enhance details on images. PhotoLab (previously named Optics 12) has incorporated Nik’s U-point Technology for image editing. In addition to PhotoLab, DxO offers FilmPack (duplicates film grain) and ViewPoint (corrects skewed perspectives from wide-angle lenses) as plugins for PhotoLab or Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop.
About the Nik Collection
The Nik Collection is composed of seven desktop plugins for Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop that provide a powerful range of photo editing capabilities. Nik tools are used for both enhancing paid and competition images. The current plugins in the Nik Collection includes:
- Analog Efex Pro: Applies film-era camera, lens, and film simulations to digital images
- Color Efex Pro: A comprehensive set of filters for color correction, retouching, and creative effects
- Dfine: Noise reduction software for camera-specific digital images
- HDR Efex Pro: Specialized program for processing HDR pictures
- Sharpener Pro: Image sharpening for digital images
- Silver Efex Pro: Black & White conversion of images with darkroom-inspired controls
- Viveza: Selectively adjusts image color and tonality without complicated masks or selections
