Upgrade Your Editing Suite

The Nik Collection by DxO is not a single plugin or suite, but a collection of eight plugins for Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom Classic, Elements, DxO PhotoLab and Serif Affinity. The collection offers a vast library of exclusive presets along with a host of retouching tools. This collection of plugins allow you to edit your images easily without much technical expertise. Being a pack of plugins, it is not feasible to illustrate the capabilities of each of these in a few pages. While this review might not bring out all the capabilities in detail, we would try to evaluate the Nik Collection as a whole and attempt to look at each of these in details in our subsequent issues. For this review, I am using the Nik Collection from Photoshop.

- Sujith Gopinath

Key Features

The Nik Collection 3 includes eight plugins—Analog Efex Pro 2, Color Efex Pro 4, Dfine 2, HDR Efex Pro 2, Perspective Efex, Sharpener Pro 3 (for Raw and Output), Silver Efex Pro 2, and Viveza 2. These allow you to perform complex retouching without using complicated techniques. Most of these plugins except Perspective Efex use U Point technology, a proprietary technique originally developed by Nik Software founder Nils Kokemohr.

U Point enables you to click on an area of an image to set up a control point that can be adjusted in size so that changes can be made to pixels within that area that are similar to the pixels beneath the original control point. A circle of any size can be created around the control point to show the area where changes will be applied. You can control attributes such as Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, and Structure. Pixels inside the circle will only be altered if they closely match the colour channels, hue, saturation and brightness levels of the pixels under the control point. You can create as many control points as required for localised adjustments. The control points can be duplicated and moved around to precisely apply the same adjustments to similar areas in the image.