DxO Buys Nik Collection from Google, Will Resume Development

The popular Nik Collection of photo editing software will live on. Just months after Google said that it was abandoning the brand and ending development, DxO has just announced that it has acquired Nik Collection from Google and will continue development “for the benefit of the photographer community.”

Google originally acquired Nik Software and its popular Snapseed app back in 2012. The search giant then made a lot of photographers happy by dropping the price of the Nik Collection from $500 to $150 in 2013, and then from $150 to free in 2016.

In May 2017, though, Google announced that it would no longer be developing Nik Collection to update it and add new features — a huge letdown for photographers who have come to rely on the plugins that do things like film simulation, black-and-white conversion, HDR, noise reduction, sharpening, and other useful post-processing tasks.

Today, Nik Collection has been given new life thanks to the French company that creates image processing software as well as highly influential camera equipment reviews through its DxOMark brand.

The current Nik Collection is now available for free through the DxO website — simply provide your email address and the download links will be sent to your inbox. The package contains 7 desktop plugins for Photoshop and Lightroom.

It seems Nik Collection technologies may also be incorporated into existing DxO software. DxO has just rebranded its OpticsPro RAW conversion software as DxO PhotoLab, and the new update includes the Nik Collection’s U Point technology:

DxO says that it’s also planning to release a new version of the Nik Collection sometime around the middle of 2018. However, there’s no word yet on whether that version will continue to be free or whether it’ll start being paid software again.