With excellent reviews, the Nik Collection of seven software plugins is highly desired. Discriminating photographers have been buying individual plugins or paying $499 for the whole set. Google bought the Nik Collection and dropped the price for the full collection to $150. Now you can download the whole collection for free. This is great news for everyone who has been wanting this powerful set of software editing tools but has been putting it off due to the price.

The Nik collection works with Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop Elements, and Apple Aperture. Compatibility information is here.

Screen Capture: The Plugin Software Suite

The Nik Collection includes:

Analog Efex Pro – for converting your digital images into several classic “film looks”

Color Efex Pro – with a suite of color correcting tools

Silver Efex Pro -which has long been a favorite for converting color images to black and white

Viveza – for selective color adjustments

HDR Efex Pro – for creating high dynamic range images

Sharpener Pro – for first class image sharpening

Dfine – excellent noise reduction software

The links will take you to more information on that plugin.

Screen Capture: Workflow

There will be times when you will want to use more than one of these plugins on a single image. The workflow order is important as this screen capture indicates. For example you want to reduce noise in an image before you sharpen the image or the noise will be sharpened and harder to remove.

Links

Google Nik Collection – home page with download link

Nik Collection Help Center – everything you need to know to begin using this software