Nik Collection by DxO
Version 9.1.0 · DxO Labs · Windows 10 / 11 (64-bit) · ranked #117 in the library
Eight photographic plugins covering local contrast, black and white conversion, film emulation, sharpening, noise reduction, perspective correction and colour grading, all built around control point masking.
Read the installation section below before you start. The order of the steps matters on this release.
About this release
Overview
The Nik plugins have survived several owners because the underlying idea is genuinely good. Control points let you place an adjustment at a spot in the image and set a radius, and the tool works out the mask itself from the colour and tone under that point. Dropping a point on a sky and pulling contrast affects the sky and not the roofline underneath it, without drawing a single mask by hand.
The eight tools split the work sensibly. Color Efex for creative filters and local contrast, Silver Efex for black and white conversion with film grain structure that reads as film rather than as noise, Analog Efex for camera and lens era emulation, Viveza for targeted colour and tone adjustment, Sharpener for capture and output sharpening in separate passes, Dfine for noise reduction, Perspective Efex for geometric and lens correction, and HDR Efex for exposure merging and tone mapping.
They install into the hosts you already work in and can be chained, so a black and white conversion followed by a sharpening pass happens in one round trip. In Photoshop they run as smart filters with the settings kept live, in Lightroom Classic they run as an external editor step, and the standalone launcher lets a file be processed without a host at all. Presets are shared across machines and every tool keeps a full history of the applied adjustment stack.
What it does
Feature breakdown
Control point masking
Place an adjustment at a point with a radius and the mask is derived from the colour and tone underneath it, which removes most manual masking.
Color Efex and Viveza
Creative filters, local contrast and targeted colour and tone adjustment, stackable with independent opacity and their own control points.
Silver Efex black and white
Conversion with real film grain structure, per-channel sensitivity, and toning that holds up in print rather than looking like a desaturation.
Sharpener and Dfine
Separate capture and output sharpening passes plus noise reduction that measures the noise in the frame rather than applying a fixed amount.
Perspective Efex and Analog Efex
Geometric and lens correction including volume deformation, alongside emulation of older camera and lens characteristics.
Multi-host and standalone
Runs inside Photoshop as a smart filter, in Lightroom Classic as an external editor step, and on its own through the standalone launcher.
Changed in this build
Version 9.1.0
- Faster rendering on high resolution files across every tool in the collection.
- New preset collections added to Color Efex and Silver Efex.
- Control point mask calculation improved on fine detail such as branches against sky.
- Standalone launcher rebuilt with a browsable file picker and batch queue.
- Better colour handling when chaining tools in a single round trip.
Installation
Follow these in order
- Close every host application before starting.
- Extract the archive to a local drive.
- Disable real time protection.
- Run setup as administrator and select which hosts to install into.
- Apply the included activation component after the files are copied.
- Open a host, confirm the plugins appear in the filter menu, then restore protection.
Release notes
From whoever packed it
- In Lightroom the plugins operate on a rendered file rather than the raw data, which is a limitation of the external editor path rather than of the tools.
- Preset libraries are shared across hosts. Do not move the folder or the browsers come up empty.
- Block the updater. An update replaces the activated components across all eight tools.
System requirements
Minimum and recommended
| Operating system | Windows 10 version 22H2 or Windows 11, 64-bit |
|---|---|
| Host application | Photoshop or Lightroom Classic recommended, though the standalone launcher works alone |
| Processor | Intel or AMD multicore, 2 GHz or faster |
| Memory | 8 GB minimum, 16 GB recommended for high resolution work |
| Storage | 4 GB for the collection and its preset libraries |
Questions about this release
Answered before you ask
- Do they work as smart filters?
- Yes, in Photoshop, which keeps the adjustments editable after the fact.
- Can I chain two tools in one pass?
- Yes, the launcher and the host integration both allow a chain in a single round trip.
- Is the standalone version included?
- Yes, so a file can be processed without any host application installed.
Download
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