DxO Nik Collection 8

The Latest DxO Nik Collection is Here and It's Definitely Worth Checking Out!

You Can't Miss These Stunning Updates in the New Nik Collection Editing Suite!

Hi, my name is Rich Dyson from Edinburgh Photography Workshop, and this is Coffee Break Photography.

I remember being totally blown away by Silver Efex Pro, a black and white editing tool that used to be free on Google’s site. It was the best at turning color photos into amazing monochrome images. Google snapped it up along with other programs from Nik Software to get their hands on Snapseed, a cool mobile editing app. Google made the Nik Collection free, but didn’t bother with future OS updates. Luckily, DxO came to the rescue in 2017 and bought the Nik Collection, making some awesome improvements. And guess what? The latest version is out today, May 6, 2025!

The new Nik Collection celebrates 30 years with significant updates. Improved masks streamline workflows, and there's a new method to switch images in and out of Photoshop. A dedicated panel is now available for suite access. Silver Efex Pro has been completely revamped, and Nik Color Efex allows precise edits based on colour ranges. Let's explore the suite and see these changes in action.

Let’s start with Silver Efex Pro. The latest version is available as a plug-in to all the usual editing programs such as Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, DxO’s Photo Lab, Affinity Photo and CaptureOne. As we’ll see later though there are some specific changes to the way we’ll use these tools in Photoshop. But for now, I’ll switch from Lightroom to Silver Efex. Right click on the photo and choose the Edit In option and pick Silver Efex 8.

The biggest change you’ll see is that all the filters have moved from the right hand-side of the screen to the left. The only tools on the right-hand of the screen are the Film Types, which allows us to emulate classic film styles of the past by applying grain, brightness and contrast changes as well as vignettes. I know many wedding photographers really value this as a tool to give their images that classic, timeless look. If we want to, we can also make tweaks to the film types.

When we use one of the filters on the left-hand side, let’s say the Toning Panel. We can open up the preset options and select one of them. You can see that the selected filter now opens on the right-hand side of the screen, and we can make any tweaks to the preset, to suit our individual editing style. We can apply as many filters as we like to the image, so let’s also add a vignette to this picture and adjust the fall off slightly. If this is an edit you want to apply regularly, you can save it as a custom preset to speed up your editing even more. 

I like the tidiness of the new layout, but personally, I think it would be better if the headline of the filter stayed static on the left panel rather than scrolling up as we view all the presets. This would make it easier to switch between the different filter types and help to streamline the workflow.

So big changes to Silver Efex which now aligns it with the layout we see in Color Efex. The biggest change though is seen in the way the Nik Suite works in Photoshop. I have an image open in Photoshop, and the first thing you’ll notice is that the floating palette has been replaced by a new Nik Panel over here on the right-hand side, and we can now make calls to all the Nik Collection tools from this panel. Before we head over into one of the tools, I have used the power of the Adobe AI selection tools to create some layers. We already have the sky and hotel selected. I’ll duplicate the base layer and then go to the Select menu and take the option Subject. With the selection active, I can now add a layer mask, so we have a new layer which I’ll call ‘Person’. We’re now ready to head into Color Efex.

In the panel, we have some options to choose before start editing in Color Efex. We can choose to open a combination of all the layers or just choose the active layer. I’ll leave it set to all layers. We can also decide which layers masks we want to take into the Nik Collection. The options are to send All Masks, Selected Masks or No Masks. I’m going to leave it set to All Masks and then click on the icon for whichever Nik Collection tool I want to use. 

You’ve probably noticed that the icons have changed in this new version. As I hover over the icon, you can see all the tools available in Nik Collection 8. Color Efex, Silver Efex, Analog Efex, Viveza, Dfine, Presharpener, Sharpener Output, HDR Efex, and HDR Efex Tone mapping. We’ll take the option Color Efex.

Now we are using the panel, Photoshop is locked out from being used while we have the Nik Collection open. I’ll go back to Color Efex and the first thing I am going to apply is some additional Brilliance and Warmth. Press the plus sign and the filter opens up on the right-side. I’m going to push the saturation a little; increase the warmth and also add Perceptual Saturation to around 25%. The hotel building looks really good with this change, but I don’t like what’s happening to the sky. This is where a new feature in the Nik Collection comes in handy. Click on the Import Masks button and we can decide which of the masks we created in Photoshop will be applied to this filter. 

I’d like to bring out the woman in the foreground a little more. I’m going to use the Pro Contrast tool and move the Dynamic Contrast to around 60%, push the shadows to about 25% and the highlights to 65%. Again, the filter is being applied to the entire image, so I can select the filter to be used and just apply it to the Person layer.

I’d like to apply a stronger Dynamic Contrast to the sky to really bring out the detail that I captured but is showing as quite flat at the moment. Click on Pro Contrast again, and we have a new instance on the right-side. I’ll push the Dynamic Contrast to 100% and then apply this only to the Sky layer.

Let’s add one more change to the image but only to the gold elements of the hotel building, and to do this we are going to use the new Color Mask option. We’ll select the Detail Extractor tool, and then click on the new colour mask button. I’ll click on a gold element in the building. If I click on the local adjustment mask button, we can see the areas of the image that are being used by the filter. I can then adjust the colour area that is being applied by dragging these two boxes at the top, left or right and you can see the selected area change. If I wanted to only move the colour range one way, click on the Link range button here, and now I can just adjust one element of the colour range slider. Let’s remove the adjustment mask and we can see the effect of the filter using this colour mask. 

Let’s do a compare and contrast of the start and end image. I think you can see that’s its quite a difference. 

If you wish to, you can export this edited image by click up here, and you have the option to either export it as a TIFF file or a JPEG file. Selecting preferences allows you to decide where the file should be exported out to. I prefer to leave it as the Original Folder, but it’s up to you and your workflow where you think is best.

However, remember that this file started in Photoshop, so we can apply these changes and head back into the original program. Next to the apply button and we have four options. The first three are the options we had in Nik Collection 7, but this last one is new. Select New Layer with Mask and then press the Apply button. It takes a few seconds for all those edits to be applied and if we switch back into Photoshop, we can see that there is a new layer, and the layer mask is totally black. We can now use the brush button with a white background to paint in all our changes that were applied in Color Efex over the image. 

I like the flexibility of being able to dial in our out the changes we applied in the Nik Collection, but it would great if there was an option to apply the mask as either black or white.

This is an impressive update to the Nik Collection suite and it’s starting to use the power of the Adobe Photoshop selection, layers and masking tools to apply very specific changes to our images. I have asked the question already if masks in Lightroom, Affinity etc. will start to see this functionality and there is a desire to make this happen, but, at the moment, it’s been easier to apply this into Photoshop only. I wonder if we’ll be sat here in May 2026 and seeing generic mask controls between all the supported editing tools, as I am predominantly a Lightroom user, I certainly hope so!

You can download a 30-day trail of the new Nik Collection 8 using the affiliate link in the comments section below. If you are already convinced, new users will pay £145.99 or 159.99 US dollars or euros. If you already have Nik Collection six or seven, then you can upgrade for £79.99 or 89.99 euro and US dollars.

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