The Nik Collection is an important collection of plug-ins once published by Nik Software but then taken over by Google when it bought the company. Google then made the Nik Collection free but it has now been bought for future commercial development by DxO.
You’ll find no shortage of tutorials on how to achieve certain photo editing effects in different editors, but very little on which direction to take your images. It’s all ‘how’ and no ‘why’. That’s why I rate software like the Nik Collection and ON1 Photo RAW so highly. They don’t just give you tools, they give you ideas.
The Analog Efex Bokeh filter looks simple, but used with a bit of care and judgement (and on the right subjects) it can produce terrific shallow depth of field and ‘miniature’ effects.
Verdict: 4 stars Nik Collection 9 is a deep, powerful and inspirational set of creative plug-ins for photographers. Version 9 adds four new filters, AI masking and Photoshop-style blend modes to make this one of the most comprehensive updates yet. It’s fairly expensive, though, and you might not get quite so much use out of Dfine, Sharpener and Viveza, which are starting to look a bit out of place.
I’ve been using the Nik Collection for a long time and I thought DxO had already taken this wonderful plug-in suite as far as it could go… but I was wrong! Nik Collection 9 has some spectacular new filters and masking tools that I will give a full and detailed review. In the meantime, here are the highlights.
Like all good black and white photo editing tools, Silver Efex can ‘filter’ the colours in your digital images to translate them into different shades of grey. You can replicate the effect of traditional black and white ‘contrast’ filters, achieving dramatic blue skies with a red filter effect, richer landscape tones with a yellow filter effect and more. Here’s how it works.
Depending on who you ask, either Photoshop or Lightroom is the world’s most popular photo editor. I’d be inclined to back Lightroom, given that it’s clearly photography-focused, whereas Photoshop is really a design tool that also does photography. But both miss a huge part of the photography style spectrum – what I’m going to call ‘organic’ photography.
The Basic Adjustments panel is one of the ‘optional’ Filters in Nik Silver Efex 8. What this means is that if you are building an effect from scratch, you can add it manually from the list of Filters in the left sidebar, or not use it at all. You will find it’s included as standard in many Silver Efex presets, though, and despite being ‘Basic’, it’s actually central to a lot of black and white ‘looks’.
Silver Efex, part of the DxO Nik Collection is one of the best editing tools you can get for black and white photography, but the range of tools available and their interactions can sometimes be difficult to unravel. So here’s a guide to one of the most basic and effective tools of all – Film Styles. It’s often enough, even on its own, to produce rich and satisfying black and white versions of your digital images.
Analog Efex is one of the creative plug-ins in the DxO Nik Collection and it’s a bit of an outlier because, first of all, it was developed by Google and not Nik Software (it appeared during Google’s ownership of the Nik Collection) and secondly, because it can produce the most amazing results from filters which individually don’t seem to amount to very much. I’ll explain.
DxO’s Black Friday deals may have been and gone, but there’s a new Christmas deal where you can save 20% if you buy two products, so that’s any combination of DxO PhotoLab 9.2, Nik Collection 8.2, DxO PureRAW 5.5, FilmPack 8 or ViewPoint 5. You’ll also get between 3 and 12 months of priority support, depending on the size of your order.