Color Efex Pro and Silver Efex get new presets for portraits, wildlife, street photography and other contemporary styles
(Image credit: DxO)
DxO has released the Nik Collection 3.3 to celebrate the 25-year anniversary of the launch of the Nik Collection. The update comes with five themed sets of presets, each with five variations, which are shared between the Color Efex Pro and Silver Efex Pro plug-ins.
The themes are “Classic Portrait Color”, “Classic Portrait Black & White”, “Light & Bright”, “Wildlife” (used for the striking main image with this story) and “Street”. Like other Nik Collection presets they can be applied with a single click and modified at will with the built in manual adjustment tools.
The Nik Collection has had a long and sometimes bumpy history. First launched by Nik Software 25 years ago as an expensive premium priced suite, it then fell into Google’s hands where it was sold for a while at $149 and the Analog Efex Pro plug-in added. Google then stopped developing it and distributed it for a time as a free product before it was bought by DxO and brought back to life as a fully updated, refreshed and modernised plug-in suite. Now more than ever, the Nik Collection is regarded as one of the most important and best-loved plug-in suites on the market.
DxO Nik Collection 3.3 brings five new 'street' styles for Silver Efex Pro, with dense blacks, bright highlights, grain and depth of field effects. (Image credit: DxO)
Silver Efex Pro (shown here) and Color Efex Pro both get five new portrait presets. (Image credit: DxO)
DxO Nik Collection 3.3 is compatible with Apple’s latest Big Sur Mac operating system, and with the 2021 versions of Adobe’s creative apps. It was also the winner of the the 2020-2021 EISA Award for Best Photo-Editing Software.
The Nik Collection is a suite of eight plug-in tools that work directly from Photoshop, Lightroom Classic and DxO PhotoLab. However, they can also work as standalone programs and be used as external editors by other software.
Nik Collection 3.3 price and availability
DxO Nik Collection 3.3 is a free update for existing Nik Collection 3 users who bought that versions after its launch in June 2020. Owners of Nik Collection 2 or earlier DxO versions can upgrade for $79/£69 by logging in to their user accounts. The full price for new users is $149/£125.
Rod is an independent photography journalist and editor, and a long-standing Digital Camera World contributor, having previously worked as DCW's Group Reviews editor. Before that he has been technique editor on N-Photo, Head of Testing for the photography division and Camera Channel editor on TechRadar, as well as contributing to many other publications. He has been writing about photography technique, photo editing and digital cameras since they first appeared, and before that began his career writing about film photography. He has used and reviewed practically every interchangeable lens camera launched in the past 20 years, from entry-level DSLRs to medium format cameras, together with lenses, tripods, gimbals, light meters, camera bags and more. Rod has his own camera gear blog at fotovolo.com but also writes about photo-editing applications and techniques at lifeafterphotoshop.com
