Google has officially dropped the price of Nik Collection from $150 to absolutely free. For those who are not familiar with Nik Collection, it is a set of seven desktop photo-editing plug-ins which incluses HDR Efex Pro, Analog Efex Pro, Color Efex Pro, Sharpener Pro, Silver Efex Pro, Viveza and Dfine. These plug-ins by Google can be installed to both Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom. I installed the Nik Collection to Adobe Lightroom as i am a frequent user of this software.
Google purchased the Nik software in the year 2012, rebranded it as Nik Collection and in the year 2013 the price was slashed from $500 to $150. Why did Google decide to provide this great set of tools for free? Well, here is the official statement:
“As we continue to focus our long-term investments in building incredible photo editing tools for mobile, including Google Photos and Snapseed, we’ve decided to make the Nik Collection desktop suite available for free…”
I have personally used couple of these plug-ins and hands down these are the best in the market. Using the Google Nik Collection plug-ins, you can retouch, sharpen, add filters, reduce noise and what not that too for free of cost now. If you by any chance have purchased the Nik Collection plug-ins in the year 2016, Google has announced that you will receive full refund in the coming days.
The entire set of Nik Collection is free to download starting 24th march, 2016. To read more about these awesome seven plug-ins and to download them, click here.