The Nik Collection is a suite of photo editing plugins intended for use with a host application, such as Adobe Lightroom, Affinity Photo or DxO PhotoLab.
History
Nik Sharpener and Nik Color Efex were developed by Nik Multimedia Inc. in the 1990s as digital photo filters that could be used in Photoshop or as standalone applications. Some years later, in 2003, Dfine 1.0, a denoising application and plugin was added to the list of products on offer.
The newly rebranded Nik Software company then added Viveza and Silver Efex to the offer in 2008, and subsequently bundled all of their award-winning photo editing plugin applications, Dfine 2.0, Viveza, Color Efex Pro 3.0, Silver Efex Pro and Sharpener Pro 3.0 together in a single Collection. The Complete Collection Ultimate Edition sold for $599.95 USD and the Complete Collection for Lightroom and Aperture for $299.95 USD. HDR EFex was added to the collection in 2010.
After acquisition, Google relaunched the collection of six applications, with the new Analog Efex, in 2013 as the Google Nik Collection and reduced its price to $150 and then, in 2016, made it completely free to use.
In 2017 Google sold the, now seven-application, collection to DxO Labs for an undisclosed amount. DxO Labs have since added an eighth application: Perspective Efex.
In 2023 it was announced that version 6.3 marked the first release of the software built entirely using DxO's own code.
U Points
U Point technology was originally developed by Nik Software in the early 2000s as a way to make selective adjustments. They realized that making selections in Photoshop was very difficult and time consuming, the tools were often very difficult to learn and even harder to master. The name U Point comes from the idea that 'you', the photographer, chooses what to adjust in the photo. U-Point algorithms enable selections based on each pixel’s attributes, such as hue, saturation, brightness, and contrast. So, there is no need for users to create masks in Nik Collection; instead, using Control Points or Control Lines, they construct sophisticated selections based on pixel attributes.
Awards
Nik Software Complete Collection won the TIPA Award for Best Photo Software in 2011 Version 3 of the software won the EISA 2020 Award for Best Photo Editing Software