Nik Collection 6

It’s hard to believe that the Nik Collection of software has existed for 28 years. Originally produced by a small German software team, it was sold to Google and lay undeveloped and unsupported for years. Eventually, DxO took the suite from Google and added new features. Just launched today (16 May 2023) is Nik Collection 6, which adds new features to some editing tools and the promise of more to come later in the Summer.

What is the Nik Collection?

If you haven’t used the Nik Collection before, it is a set of eight software tools that can be used standalone or as plugins in Photoshop or Lightroom.

The creative tools are Colour Efex, which controls colour, tone, contrast and more. Silver Efex is the tool that initially brought me to the Nik Collection and allowed for simple conversion to black and white, with a variety of pre-set templates and the ability to create your own. Analog Efex can give photos a vintage feel by recreating historic film types. Viveza shapes colour and manipulates tones.

Additionally, there are four technical tools, including Nik Dfine, which removes digital noise without destroying detail. Nik Perspective fixes perspective and distortion. HDR Efex for combining stacked images. Finally, Nik Sharpener enhances images without creating damaging artefacts.

The benefit of the Nik Collection for photographers is that it enhances the creative process by giving fast and powerful technical solutions integrated with the most popular editing programs used by picture-takers.

What’s new in Nik Collection 6?

The Nik Collection has based itself on the U Point™ technology, which made creating selections easier to apply edits to certain image elements. Nik Collection 6 brings upgrades to the way the tool can be used.

The first versions of the Nik Collection used to attach sliders to the U Point selections. Some people found this confusing, so the sliders were moved to the sidebar, in common with many other editing tools. Not everyone liked the new layout, and you can now decide which works best for you with a switch to keep the cleaner look or use the traditional method.

Nik Collection 6 gives greater compatibility with other editing programs by adding the auto-detection of Affinity Photo. You can also turn edits into a Smart Object from within the plugin, giving you fully non-destructive editing in Photoshop. The last 15 Nik Collection edits are available as a preset so you can apply them as a single-click. You can also search for presets by name to find your favourite edits instantly.

Let’s look at some of these changes in more detail.

U Point Changes

U Point™ technology allows you to place a point on your image, which allows you to selectively edit things with the same colour in a defined area.  In the Nik Collection 6, a Control Line is added to add selective edits with a linear gradient. This makes bringing out the details in clouds for landscape photos easier. Select the option highlighted below, and drag the lines onto your photo. Anything below the lower line will have zero effect. Things above the top line have a 100% effect applied, and the area between the two lines has a gradient applied to the area.

A new diffusion slider (circled in red) has been added to control points that regulate the adjustments’ strength and style. Moving the slider to 0% applies changes to the selection point with a sharp edge; moving diffusion towards 100% softens the changes around the edges.

When adding multiple control points to photos, it’s easy to get lost as to which point is adjusting different parts of the image. A simple but excellent interface change now allows individual control points and lines to be renamed (circled in blue).

Also included in the changes to U Point™ are;

• Control Points and Control Lines can now be inverted, giving you enormous editing flexibility.
• Color Selectivity sliders allow Control Point and Control Line editing to be tied to specific colours and tones in an image.
• Local Adjustments can now be saved as Presets, giving you quick access to your most frequently used edits.

Color Efex HSL Tool

A brand-new Hue/Saturation and Luminance tool has been added to Color Efex. If you want to be able to change the colours of particular elements in an image, select the colour channel you want to affect and then adjust three sliders. This could be an excellent way for designers to produce clean colour changes with minimum effort. A few seconds of work has changed the red beach hut into a vibrant green. I would love to see a colour-dropper tool added to select the colours to be changed rather than having to determine which channels will be affected.

Dfine re-write

Nik Dfine receives a complete visual overhaul bringing it into line with the other plugins, creating a more refined experience and improved options for saving denoising recipes and returning to them in just a few clicks. Users of other DxO products will know that the PureRAW 3 product also applies de-noising to RAW files and to sharpen and clean images. There’s no additional benefit to applying Dfine to any changes already made in PureRAW. However, this is an excellent solution for denoising contrast and colour noise from your pictures if you prefer to shoot JPEGs rather than RAW (read this blog about why you should shoot RAW).

Availability and Cost

Nik Collection 6 is available now for Windows and macOS, exclusively from the DxO website (https://shop.dxo.com/en) at £135. Existing owners of Nik Collection 4 or 5 can take advantage of a special upgrade price of £69. To upgrade, customers should log into their customer account at https://shop.dxo.com/login_upgrade.php/en. Nik Collection 6 does not require a subscription and can be installed on up to three computers.

Two Nik Collection products, HDR Efex and Sharpener, have stayed the same in this update. However, DxO is working on updates that will be released in Summer 2023. These updates will be made available as they are launched as part of the purchase price.

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About the author

As well as running Edinburgh Photography Workshop, Rich Dyson is a professional photographer. His photographs are regularly used in newspapers such as The Times, Guardian and Daily Telegraph. He also had two solo exhibitions and was featured in a members-sponsored exhibition in the Scottish Parliament. You can see and buy his photography at richdysonphotography.com.