Nik Collection 3 by DxO
DxO’s acclaimed editing suite adds a Perspective Efex plugin
A new non-destructive workflow and a perspective plug-in ring the changes for this popular image editing program
With the release of version 3, Nik Collection is now a set of eight plug-ins. Six were originally developed by Nik Software and sold individually, then bought by Google and sold as a single suite, with the addition of Analog Efex Pro; they were then discontinued and given away free, and finally rescued by DxO and relaunched as a commercial package.
During all that time, most of the plug-ins have hardly changed at all. DxO added En Vogue presets and new film looks in the previous version, but it’s DxO Nik Collection 3 that has had the biggest update, including the new plug-in. The rest, however, look very much as they always have. For most software that would be a bad thing, but the Nik Collection plug-ins have a ‘timeless’ look about them and don’t seem to date at all.
It looks like bundling DxO PhotoLab with Nik Collection 2 was a short-lived experiment: it added value to the software, but led to complicated upgrade routes and frustration for existing DxO PhotoLab users, who weren’t offered any price reduction despite having a key part of the software already – not to mention owners of other software who had no interest in paying for another image-editing program.
Features
There are now eight plug-ins in the collection, although they are not all creative tools – and not all equally useful, to be fair. Analog Efex Pro is one of the most spectacular. It recreates the look of old and vintage analogue cameras, not just with different ‘film’ types, grain, fade effects and light leaks, but with glass plate effects, lens distortions a blurring, multiple exposures, bokeh effects and more. There are lots of programs on the market that replicate film looks, but every time you come back to Analog Efex Pro, you’re reminded of its scope, power and sheer invention compared to the rest.
Silver Efex Pro enjoys a similar reputation for black-and-white photography, which is about so much more than just the absence of colour. It recaptures the depth, intensity and subtlety of black-and-white films and darkroom processes in a way that other programs struggle to match.
Color Efex Pro is equally powerful, but comes across as a bit of a jack of all trades that’s overshadowed by the other plug-ins. On the surface, it’s just a large collection of photo filters and effects, some of which are a lot more
useful than others. The magic happens when you combine these filters as ‘recipes’, using DxO’s control point technology to remove or add different filter effects in different parts of your images.
HDR Efex Pro can merge a series of bracketed exposures or create a tone-mapped HDR image from a single photo, and it has a wide selection of preset HDR effects to choose from. Skylum’s Aurora HDR is better, but costs almost as much as the entire Nik Collection, so for occasional HDR experimenters, HDR Efex Pro is more than adequate.
These are the ‘big four’ creative plug-ins in the Nik Collection, and this is where you’ll find the 42 En Vogue presets introduced in version 2. The next three plug-ins take a bit of a downturn. Viveza is really a showcase for Nik’s control point adjustments – you can think of it as like a dodging and burning tool, but for colour images rather than black and white. Dfine and Sharpener Pro, meanwhile, feel increasingly irrelevant today.
Perspective Efex is the all-new plug-in for Nik Collection 3. Quick, simple and powerful to use, it can apply lens corrections automatically (but only if it gets an unedited image from the host program) and manually. Then it goes further still with a neat tilt-shift ‘miniature’ tool.
Nik Collection may have been around for a long time, but the sense of excitement and discovery these plug-ins create are as fresh as ever. Rod Lawton
Nik Collection plug-ins have a ‘timeless’ look