DxO Nik Collection 9 review

Pros

• Analog Efex, Color Efex, Silver Efex are the stars
• Huge range of varied and inspiring presets
• Optional non-destructive workflow
• New AI masking and blend modes

Cons

• Viveza, Dfine and Sharpener are perhaps less useful
• Non-destructive TIFF files are large
• Some crossover between plug-ins
• Expensive compared to ON1 Effects, for example

Introduction

The Nik Collection is a well-regarded suite of creative and technical plug-ins that have been around a long time. Now owned by DxO it’s upgraded annually with new features and additions that are sometimes relatively minor but in the version 9 update they are quite substantial.

DxO operates a two-year upgrade policy so that you can afford to skip an update and still benefit from special upgrade pricing when the next one comes around. Or, if you are happy with the existing features you can use the Nik Collection plug-ins for many years without restriction, since the Nik Collection is sold with a perpetual license, not a subscription.

The seven plug-ins in the suite can be accessed from within Photoshop, Lightroom or Affinity, and can be used as external editors from Capture One and other programs. Importantly, they also work as standalone programs. They’re typically called plug-ins but actually work as both.

There are three main creative plug-ins – Analog Efex, Color Efex and Silver Efex, which get most of the attention in updates – plus HDR Efex, a very capable HDR merge and tone-mapping tool with its own preset effects. You also get Viveza, which is designed for both global and local color adjustments, but which doesn’t really offer the same creative range as the previous four. Rounding off the Nik Collection are Dfine and Sharpener. Dfine is a noise reduction tool rather overshadowed by today’s newer and more effective AI denoising tools, while Sharpener is designed for ‘capture’ sharpening (regular sharpening to you and me) and ‘output sharpening’ for those who need to optimize sharpening for specific display devices and print sizes.

Features

Most of the power of the Nik Collection lies in its creative plug-ins Analog Efex, Color Efex and Silver Efex. These programs all offer a mixture of preset effects and manually selectable filters that you can choose and combine yourself.

These filters offer a lot of potential, even used on their own, each with its own in-depth controls and local adjustment tools to control which regions or subjects are affected by the filter. This is where one of the big new features in Nik Collection 9 appears, because in addition to the Nik Collection’s existing and rather clever U-point masking tools, you now get the kind of AI area and object masking tools you see in DxO PhotoLab and programs like Lightroom. With these you can automatically mask specific subjects or particular regions or shapes.

DxO has also added four new filters: Chromatic Shift and Glass (Analog Efex) and Color Grading and Halation (Color Efex). The Chromatic Shift and Glass filters are interesting graphic effects, but perhaps effects you’re not going to use very often, but the Color Grading and Halation tools are very nice. The Halation tool is particularly useful for analog effects because it nicely replicates the halation effect – the spreading of bright tones – in some films.

I do wonder, though, if DxO has added these to the right plug-ins. It seems to me the Chromatic Shift and Glass filters are graphic effects that would be better in Color Efex, while the Color Grading and Halation filters would be great to have in Analog Efex instead.

There is a lot of crossover between these plug-ins, but broadly you might say. that Analog Efex is for retro analog/camera fans, while Color Efex is more for contemporary photographic effects. Silver Efex, largely unchanged in Nik Collection 9, is still a go-to tool for dedicated black and white photographers.

AI masking and the new filters aren’t the only changes in Nik Collection 9. It’s now possible to change a filter’s blend mode, Photoshop-style, which will alter not just the way filters interact with others, but how they interact with the image itself. It’s a far-reaching change that could take some time to explore fully but substantially extends the Nik Collection’s creative depth and potential.

Usability

The Nik Collection plug-ins are very straightforward to use. Since taking over this suite, DxO has worked to make the look and feel of its plug-ins more consistent and logical. If you don’t want to get into the nitty gritty of individual filters you can just start by choosing a preset in the left sidebar that you like the look of and only drill down into the filter settings in the right sidebar if you want to adjust the effect and make it your own.

Analog Efex has an excellent range of presets that truly show off its retro potential. Color Efex has fewer, and it is perhaps more of a hands-on tool. Silver Efex has a great range of presets, from delicate fine art looks to gritty noir effects or vintage-style toning.

HDR Efex rarely gets much of a mention, but it’s worth pointing out that it can be used as a plug-in for tonal enhancements to single images, or as a standalone application for merging sets of bracketed exposures into a single HDR image. Like a lot of HDR applications it invents some jargon all of its own and you do sometimes have to resort to trial and error to see what’s going to work, but with its range of tone mapping tools, HDR methods and both global and local adjustments, it’s really quite powerful.

Viveza is a bit of an odd fish in that its scope as a colour editing tool is quite modest. Indeed, four of its key tools have been incorporated into Color Efex as dedicated filters. I don’t spend a lot of time with Viveza, but other people might find it more useful than I do.

Dfine looks quite technical but is actually pretty straightforward. It analyses your images to create noise profiles as the basis for its noise reduction, or you can define profile areas in the image yourself. With the noise profile defined, the noise reduction options are pretty simple, and you can apply local noise reduction if you want to.

Sharpener operates in two modes – ‘capture’ sharpening and ‘output sharpening’. The capture sharpening is straightforward, though it seems likely you’d be doing your sharpening in your host application rather than a plug-in. The output sharpening mode could prove useful to anyone making prints, but while it’s also very effective for on-screen images, today’s content management systems and social channels mess around so much with image dimensions it’s hard to predict what size you need to optimize your images for.

The Nik plug-ins work on bitmap images, like most plug-ins. Essentially, they are ‘destructive’ editors – you can’t go back and change what you’ve done. Or can you?

In fact, a while back DxO introduced a special ‘two-layer’ TIFF format that does support a non-destructive workflow. The TIFF file contains both ‘before’ and ‘after’ versions of the image and all the processing steps used. It sounds perfect, but there is a downside – TIFF files are already large in comparison to JPEGs and RAW files, and these double-layer TIFFs are twice the size. They’re fine for occasional use but not as a routine workflow – your hard disk space will get eaten up at an alarming rate.

There is just one thing. It’s great that DxO has added AI masking to its already formidable masking tools, but these masking operations can get pretty complicated as a result, even for those familiar with the Nik Collection plug-ins.

Results

I think Analog Efex is terrific. I’m hooked on vintage/distressed/lo-fil camera looks, and I don’t think any other program does it like this. The presets are the star of the show, and really are more than just the sum of their parts. 

Color Efex is equally creative, and while it has vintage effects of its own, its overall strength is in more contemporary photographic effects. With over 50 different filters, it offers so many permutations and combinations that you might never run out – but it could perhaps do with more presets just to get you started.

Silver Efex is just terrific for black and white work, somehow extracting more depth and intensity from digital images than you might ever have suspected was there. It really is like analog film. The Structure slider does tend to leave bright outlines around objects, though, and Silver Efex is crying out for a bokeh/blur tool, a wider range of border effects and perhaps texture overlays.

HDR Efex doesn’t get the credit it deserves, in my opinion at least. For my tastes I’d probably prefer to work with the HDR merge tools in Lightroom or Capture One, which are so subtle no-one would ever know you’ve used HDR techniques, but if you do want that super-saturated, super-real look, HDR Efex does it brilliantly.

Viveza seems to me to be a somewhat complicated solution to a pretty limited problem. There doesn’t seem to me to be much here that you couldn’t just do in Color Efex. Dfine is a very dated solution designed for a time when we didn’t have AI denoising and when you had to make the best of images that had already been processed. Its relevance today is limited. And it seems to me that Sharpener is in the same boat. I can see its value for printing, but most host programs like Lightroom have output sharpening tools of their own.

Value and verdict

Nik Collection 9 is really a suite of two halves. The stars are Analog Efex, Color Efex and Silver Efex, with, I think, HDR Efex as an overlooked fourth member. The other ‘half’ – Viveza, Dfine, Sharpener – don’t seem to me to be in the same class or even to serve the same audience. I can see why DxO might keep them on to satisy long-time fans who appreciate what they can do, but I think the whole suite is carried by just three/four of its plug-ins. I also think that’s fine. They are good enough to justify the cost on their own.

Though I think the cost does need a closer look. Regular visitors to this site might know that I also rate ON1 Effects very highly, as a single plug-in/application that covers a lot of the ground that the Nik Collection does but in a more integrated package and at half the price. 

However, unless there’s some kind of massive upheaval in file formats or operating systems that would stop it working, you could buy the Nik Collection today and still be using it in five or ten years time, and still be getting huge value from its presets, its filters and its creative inspiration.