DxO Nik Collection 8 review

Pros

+ Huge creative scope and choice of presets
+ Clever and powerful local adjustments
+ Deep Photoshop integration
+ Revised and simplified Silver Efex interface
+ New Color Mask tool

Cons

– Photoshop-Nik workflow can be confusing
– Only minor changes to plug-ins since version 7

What is Nik Collection 8?

Nik Collection 8 is the latest version of a set of photographic plug-ins that has been around, literally, for decades. But that doesn’t mean it’s some dated old relic from the early days of digital imaging. Quite the opposite. Over the years it’s been constantly refined, refreshed and redeveloped, especially by its current owner, DxO, to stay right at the forefront of photographic effects, styles and trends. Digital photography today is no longer all about dreary technical finessing. It’s all about the ‘look’, with the emphasis firmly on creativity, style and uniqueness – and this is what the Nik Collection does brilliantly.

Nik Collection 8 key features

The Nik suite consists of seven different plug-ins, all of which can be launched from ‘host’ applications like Lightroom Classic and Photoshop or as ‘external editors’ from programs like Capture One. We call them plug-ins, but actually they work as standalone applications too. Here’s the list:

Nik 8 Analog Efex: This is a tool for recreating old film types, darkroom processes and even vintage camera effects. It goes way beyond regular film simulations to reproduce accidental double-exposures, camera movement, cheap lenses, light leaks, streaked old photo plates and photo borders. 

Nik 8 Color Efex: This is perhaps the mainstay of the whole suite, offering more than 50 filters which can be used individually or in combination via presets. Each filter has extensive manual controls and can be applied selectively with DxO’s fast and powerful ‘U-point’ masking tools.

Nik 8 Silver Efex: This is for black and white photographers, and offers a huge range of black and white effects, borders, toning styles, actual film and grain simulation and more. It has the ability to extract superb tonality, contrast and richness from regular digital images via tools and adjusters you don’t find in a regular photo editor. 

Nik 8 HDR Efex: HDR Efex can be used for tone-mapping and applying HDR effects to regular digital images but it can also be used as a standalone program for merging sets of bracketed HDR exposures. You will need to experiment with the tools to get the effect you want, but it’s possible to achieve rich yet realistic looking high dynamic range images.

Nik 8 Viveza: Viveza is a more specialized tool designed to offer complete control over an image’s colors, both with global adjustments and local adjustments which use DxO’s Control Point, Control Line, Control Point, Luminance Mask and (new in Nik Collection 8) Color Mask tools.

Nik 8 Sharpener: We’re counting this as one plug-in but actually it’s two. Nik Presharpener is just for sharpening images which look a little soft, while Sharpener Output optimises sharpening for different devices, such as computer screens and printers.

Nik 8 Dfine: Dfine is the Nik Suite’s noise reduction plug-in, but it doesn’t work directly on RAW files and it can’t really compete with the latest AI noise reduction tools. But it can still do a decent job on  noisy old JPEGs, for example, especially with its ability to target different areas of the image with different sharpening levels.

The Nik plug-ins do split broadly into creative tools (Analog Efex, Color Efex, HDR Efex, Silver Efex) and technical enhancement tools (Sharpener, Dfine), with Viveza somewhere in the middle as a color enhancement plug-in.

Nik Collection 8 interface and usability

The Nik plug-ins themselves are really easy to use, given the degree of control they offer. The creative plug-ins – Analog Efex, Silver Efex, Color Efex, HDR Efex, Viveza share the same layout and workflow, offering a set of preset effects and individual filters in the left sidebar and settings and controls for each filter over on the right.

You can start creating images without any prior experience at all just by selecting a preset. These are shown as thumbnail previews using your currently open image. When you select a preset, you’ll see the filters it’s used and their settings over in the right sidebar. You can leave these as they are, or you can make some manual adjustments.

As you gain experience you might want to start creating your own effects from scratch by manually selecting and combining filters. And once you have a look that you like, you can save it as a custom preset of your own.

DxO’s clever masking tools are available throughout and can be applied to each individual filter. You can ‘relight’ a scene with Control Points, darken a bright sky (but not trees or foreground objects) with a Control Line, or mask more complex shapes with the Control Polygon, or selectively adjust areas according to Luminance or Color values. There’s a lot of control available here, and the possible combinations of filters and settings are mind boggling.

The Presharpener plug-in is possibly less useful today given the sophisticated sharpening tools in most ‘host’ applications, and but the Sharpener Output plug-in is more interesting, as few people realize the importance of optimizing sharpening settings for different devices. The key here, though, is to resize your images for the output device before using the plug-in.

Dfine is easy to use and offers local adjustments for targeting specific areas and objects. However, while its ‘noise profile’ measurement is a smart idea, it’s been overtaken by today’s AI denoising tools – like DxO’s own DeepPRIME process.

The workflow itself is very simple if you’re just using one plug-in. You send a program to the plug-in from your host program, do your work, and the processed image is sent back to your host software. In the case of Lightroom and Capture One, for example, it’s automatically added to your catalog alongside your original.

Things get more complex if you want to do more clever things alongside and within Photoshop, which is where a lot of the new features in Nik Collection 8 are found.

Very cleverly, DxO has found a way to leverage the cutting edge AI masking tools in Photoshop so that these masks are sent to the Nik plug-in along with the image. You can select and apply Photoshop masks in the Nik plug-ins and even combine them with DxO’s own masking tools. Finally, you can even return edited images to Photoshop with Nik masks included – though these are returned as channels rather than masks, so you do need to know a bit about Photoshop, masks and channels to make this work.

You also need to be aware that your image files can get very big very quickly. If you start working with multiple image layers in Photoshop, your files can soon run into hundreds of megabytes. It’s not DxO’s fault that layered Photoshop files get so big, but if you are going to leverage this new workflow you need to be aware of this.

The Nik Collection plug-ins can also work non-destructively, by the way, if you opt to use DxO’s clever adaptation of the TIFF format, which stores a ‘before’ version of the image, an ‘after’ version and the processing instructions needed to get there. This also produces pretty big files, especially if you opt for 16-bit TIFFs, which are the preferred option for best quality with heavy processing.

You are supposed to be able to send images and their masks to from one Nik plug-in to another via a button at the top right of the screen in each plug-in, though while this worked fine with Photoshop as the plug-in host, I couldn’t get it to work with the Nik plug-ins as external editors for other programs.

As individual effects tools, the Nik plug-ins are as simple to use as they are inspiring, but if you want to get into more complex non-destructive multi-plug-in and masking workflows, the complexity – like the file sizes – quickly escalates.

Nik Collection 8 results

There are some glitches and inconsistencies, but when you see what the Nik Collection plug-ins can do, these fade into insignificance. Color Efex is a practically bottomless resource for image effects where you will probably never fully explore all its permutations and possibilities. Analog Efex is unique in its recreation of all the charm, foibles and beautiful imperfections of analog film and cameras, and Silver Efex is unequalled as a dedicated black and white editor. HDR Efex has seen relatively little development in recent years but is still a very effective HDR tool for people who still like that characteristic HDR ‘look’, and Viveza is interesting as a highly detailed color adjustment and enhancement program – though I would probably use Color Efex for this or maybe the tools in your host application. As a creative tool it does seem a bit thinner than the rest.

Dfine possibly still has some value as a noise reduction tool for already-processed images, and Sharpener Pro should not be overlooked, especially if you want your photos to look really crisp and clear on digital displays.

The creative filters and controls in the Nik plug-ins are excellent, but this suite achieves something else beyond that. It offers a wide range of preset effects that can expand your awareness of what’s possible with your images. It opens your mind to a wider creative universe in a way that ‘straight’ photo editors like Photoshop or Affinity Photo don’t. You may think your collection of Lightroom Presets or Capture One Styles offer all the creative inspiration you need. Well, I tentatively suggest you think again, because the Nik Collection goes way further and deeper into new and uncharted creative territories.

Nik Collection 8 value for money

Nik Collection 8 is available right now in both Mac and Windows versions. It costs $159.99/£145.99 for new users or $89.99/£79.99 for anyone upgrading from Nik Collection 6 or 7. You can also get a fully-featured 30-day trial version.

It’s not cheap, but for what it does I don’t think it’s expensive. It’s also a perpetual license not a subscription, so although it’s updated every year you can carry on using the old version for as long as you like.

With Nik Collection 8, for example, I wouldn’t bother upgrading from Nik Collection 7 unless you have a Photoshop-based workflow and you don’t mind the big, multi-layered files needed to make use of the latest features.

If you’re new to the Nik Collection, I definitely recommend giving the 30-day Nik Collection 8 trial a go. 30 days is plenty long enough to see what these plug-ins can do, and I’m pretty sure that the longer you spend exploring them the more you’ll see what they are worth every penny (or cent).

There are cheaper options. ON1 Effects is also excellent. It doesn’t have quite the same scope, but it doesn’t cost as much. There’s also Luminar, if you don’t mind the relentless marketing and the AI evangelism, though I confess I don’t much like it.

My personal recommendation, though, is not to try to save money on software. Nobody should expect much from cheap lenses or cheap cameras. That works for software too.

Nik Collection 8 verdict

This verdict comes in two parts. As an upgrade for existing users, Nik Collection 8 only makes sense if your editing workflow is based around Photoshop. Mine isn’t, and that’s a decision I took a long time ago. And the reworking of the Silver Efex interface is terrific, but perhaps not enough on its own – even with some other worthy workflow tweaks DxO has introduced in this version. If you’re happy with the Nik Collection version you’ve got, keep it.

But for anyone new to the Nik Collection, the recommendation is much simpler. Just get it. If you don’t want to pay for it right now, get the 30-day trial before you make your mind up. It doesn’t matter if you’re looking for quick-fix influencer ‘looks’ or old-school photographic editing techniques or evocative retro analog looks – Nik Collection 8 absolutely nails them all.