Nik Collection is now free — my short video about it

By now, almost everyone has probably heard that Nik Collection, a set of plugins for Photoshop, Lightroom, and other applications, is now available for free. It used to cost several thousand zlotys, and after Google acquired the company the price dropped to around 500 PLN. Now the entire collection is free to download, while anyone who bought it in 2016 will receive a refund.

I mentioned it on Facebook, just like every other photography-related page. All kinds of websites covered it, including ones with nothing to do with photography, and the news spread across Twitter within seconds. Why all the excitement? It’s simple: there’s nothing better than Google’s Nik Collection for Photoshop.

These plugins save so much time that they were worth investing several thousand in. Of course, Google didn’t make them free without a reason. It acquired Nik Software for its technology rather than its products, and now plans to focus on implementing that technology in other products such as Photos.

Silver Efex

What does this mean?

There probably won’t be any new features, but nobody knows what will happen if the plugins stop working on future operating systems or in newer versions of the applications.

Analog Efex

I can’t imagine going back to work without Viveza, one of the Nik Collection plugins, and I don’t understand why Adobe still hasn’t built comparable functionality directly into Photoshop. It should have been working on this for years. Lightroom already includes something along those lines.

Viveza

Viveza is so important to me that I’ve always discussed it during my retouching workshops and encouraged people to buy it. When I created my online course, I also devoted a short video to Viveza and the other plugins, explaining how they work and what they’re for. Since the plugins are now free, I decided to make my video about them publicly available as well. Perhaps it will persuade more people to try Nik Collection, because it genuinely is worth using.

Video

Summary

You can download Google Nik Collection from this page. The plugins are compatible with Photoshop CS (version 4 or newer), CC, Elements (version 9 or newer), Lightroom (version 3 or newer), and Aperture (version 3.1 or newer). They can also run as standalone applications without any of those programs. You can find the course that includes the video above here.