Suite of Plug-Ins Provides Endless Possibilities
Review by Erik Vlietinck
DxO has continuously been improving and renewing the Nik Collection, and version 5 is the latest and, so far, the most impressive. There are eight modules in the Nik Collection 5, half of which have now been updated. In this round, Color Efex and Analog Efex have been fully updated. The first thing you’ll notice is that the interface across the updated modules has much improved. It’s easier to see where adjustments have been made, and it just looks better overall.
The Control Points in their U Point technology have been improved, as well: You can now save them as part of your presets and, in the next image, they’ll appear in exactly the same spot with the same adjustments in place. Fine-tuning Control Points wasn’t easy before, but now you can adjust their sensitivity according to similar colors and levels of brightness. It allows for more uniformity across a plane where you have multiple points to cover an area.
Color Efex has been reorganized so that the presets are easier to access. While the effect of local filters targets specific areas of your image, multiple Control Points work together intelligently. There are also 29 brand-new, authentic film grains in Color Efex.
Analog Efex now has the same design look as the other updated modules and its Control Points allow you to adjust detail, brightness, contrast, and saturation in the areas you want. A module that I personally like very much is Nik Perspective Efex, which now supports more than 4,500 new camera and lens combinations. That means the Optics Modules from DxO now support a total of more than 70,000 camera and lens combinations. The interface of this Perspective Efex, though, looks slightly different from the others. Note: You don’t need this module if you have DxO PhotoLab 5 ELITE.
When you buy Nik Collection 5, you also receive DxO PhotoLab 5 ESSENTIAL edition, the powerful editing software from DxO. ■
Sadly, DxO is not going to upgrade NIK Collection 5 to Windows 11 per correspondence I have received from DxO/NIK. I find it hard to accept that they are not supporting upgrades in various OS. I have used this program from its early years and find it very disappointing that in all I read the writers do not mention what the requirements are for NIK which does not go beyond Windows 10.