Google’s Nik Collection now free to download

Sometime in 2012, Google purchased a German company called Nik software that specialized in photo editing tools that targeted the amateur to professional photographers.  And Google’s primary intention, was of course to gain a controlling hand over the popular Android/iOS photo editing application Snapseed, but that aside.  Anyway, Google was originally going to offer the Nik Collection for around ZMW1,600, down from around ZMW5,600, but, that has since changed with Google announcing that the collection will now be freely available to download from the Nik Collection page.

According to Google, the Nik collection offers “a powerful range of photo editing capabilities — from filter applications that improve colour correction, to retouching and creative effects, to image sharpening that brings out all the hidden details, to the ability to make adjustments to the colour and tonality of images,”.  So if, you recently discovered that a DSLR set to auto can work wonders even for the most inexperienced hands, you might want to take that a little further and add some professional effects to your images, legally!

In a post shared publicly on the Google+ page of the Nik Collection, google also added:

Photo enthusiasts all over the world use the Nik Collection to get the best out of their images every day. 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, so that now anyone can use it.

The Nik Collection is comprised of seven desktop plug-ins that provide a powerful range of photo editing capabilities — from filter applications that improve color correction, to retouching and creative effects, to image sharpening that brings out all the hidden details, to the ability to make adjustments to the color and tonality of images.

Starting March 24, 2016, the latest Nik Collection will be freely available to download: Analog Efex Pro, Color Efex Pro, Silver Efex Pro, Viveza, HDR Efex Pro, Sharpener Pro and Dfine. If you purchased the Nik Collection in 2016, you will receive a full refund, which we’ll automatically issue back to you in the coming days.

The Nik Collection can be downloaded here.  Happy editing to you all! #ICTZM