DxO has announced Nik Collection 5, the update to its popular suite of 8 Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom Classic and DxO PhotoLab plugins. The latest version updates Color Efex Pro and Analog Efex Pro with refreshed interfaces and the same enhanced U-Point Technology for making local adjustments that was introduced to Silver Efex Pro 3 and Viveza 3 with Nik Collection 4.
Color Efex Pro is the Nik Collection plugin for making colour corrections and applying creative filter effects while Analog Efex Pro simulates the appearance of using traditional cameras, lenses and film.
Both plugins get a cleaner, more modern look with the key effects or filters being arranged in a column on the left of the screen and the adjustment tools on the right.
Color Efex also gets DxO’s ClearView technology which removes haze, and 29 colour film grain effects. The grain effects aren’t just a blanket treatment, they take into account the local brightness across the image to accurately reproduce the look of specific films.
U-Point technology is a local adjustment tool that enables adjustments to be targeted towards specific areas using Control points and without having to create masks. Now in Nik Collection 5, these adjustments can be applied even more precisely using the Luminance and Chrominance sliding controls in Color Efex Pro and Analog Efex Pro – in the same way as in Silver Efex Pro 3 and Viveza 3.
In addition, the Control points can now be renamed to make it easier to know which controls a specific part of the image.
Nik Perspective Efex update
Nik Perspective Efex is designed to enable quick and easy correction of geometric distortion. In Nik Collection 5, this has been upgraded with correction profiles for more than 20 new cameras and 60 lenses, meaning it now has profiles for over 70,000 camera and lens combinations.
DxO PhotoLab 5 Essential now included
DxO has also added DxO PhotoLab 5 Essential to the suite. DxO PhotoLab 5 Essential is the introductory version of the company’s powerful raw file editing software with camera and optical flaw correction profiles as well as manual adjustment tools.
Nik Collection 5 price and availability
Nik Collection 5 (Windows and macOS) is now available for download from DxO for £ 135. Photographers who already own Nik Collection 4 can upgrade their software for £69 by signing into their customer accounts.
It’s also possible to try a fully functional version of Nik Collection 5 for one month.