It dropped the price for the Collection from $500 to $150 a huge drop, much to the joy of photographers everywhere, unless you’d just bought them. In 2012, Google bought the company to get access to the code for use in its own products, as well as selling the plug-ins. Thirty-five percent of the company was owned by camera company Nikon, for whom Nik created Capture NX for editing Nikon camera files. At the time, the plug-ins could be bought individually, or as a discounted set. The company, Nik Software, created most of the plug-ins between 19. As one of the oldest plug-in sets out there, most photographers have probably come across it at some point. It’s probably bad of us to assume familiarity with the Nik Collection. With PhotoLab 5 ESSENTIAL, you can go straight from camera to Nik processing without the need for another host application. This means that casual plug-in users get a free RAW converter using DxO’s much-loved conversion process. A surprise new addition is that of PhotoLab 5 ESSENTIAL. These give far greater precision for making local adjustments within each filter. The new additions to control points seen in Silver Efex in the previous release, have also been added.

In line with the previous plug-in updates, Color Efex gets both ClearView and film grain additions, which add world-class dehaze and film grain emulations, respectively. With this update, the creative part has been fully rewritten and updated with a modern interface. In the mind of DxO, there are two parts to the Nik Collection: the creative part, which covers Color Efex, Silver Efex, Analog Efex, and Viveza and the technical part, which covers Dfine, Perspective Efex, HDR Efex, and Sharpener. This time it’s Color Efex and Analog Efex getting that love.

Like the previous update, two of the plug-ins have been rewritten from the ground up. In mid June they launched Nik Collection 5. Despite the transition between many companies, they’re keeping the flame alive and regularly adding value to these much-loved and -used plug-ins. As the keeper of the Nik Collection keys, DxO is mindful of its heritage.

Colour efex pro