The title of the article deserves three exclamation marks, because this is one of the best news I have seen in photographic history! Google has just announced that it has made the best plugins for Photoshop and Lightroom, bundled into a single “Google’s Nik Collection” absolutely free (it was priced at $150 per license before). This is awesome, and no, it is not an April 1st Fool’s Day joke! As of today, March 24th 2016, you can download Google’s Nik Collection for free by visiting this page and clicking the “Download Now” button on the top of the page.
Here is the official announcement from Google, which was posted on Google+:
Today we’re making the Nik Collection available to everyone, for free.
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.
We’re excited to bring the powerful photo editing tools once only used by professionals to even more people now.
What’s also cool, is that Google will be refunding people their money, if they had made the purchase of the software in 2016! If you have never tried Nik Software, hurry up, visit the Nik Collection page and give it a try. My favorite tools that I use constantly are: Viveza, Color Efex Pro, Dfine, Sharpener Pro and Silver Efex Pro. Going forward, we are planning to release more tutorials on how to use these amazing tools on our website!
My only concern is, I hope this announcement does not mean that Google will completely abandon this project. With new operating system updates and patches getting released every month and with higher resolution screens becoming more common, I hope Google will continue patching up and updating the software in the future.
Thank you Google, this is the best gift you could have given to the photographic community. Please, don’t forget to keep the tools up-to-date. It has been a while since the plugins received updates!
And now it costs money again, im glad i got the free version. Did google sell it orso?
Anyone kmow how to fix issues with windows XP. I have down loadedand installed Nik Collection 1.2.11 successfully to Photoshop CS5, but have problems.
Firstly when opening Photoshop I get the following error message
Owl Orpanage: Photoshop.exe Entry Point not found
The procedure entry point SHCreateShellItemArreyFromShellItem could not be located in the dynamic link library SHELL.dll
When clicking OK Photoshop continues to load. I can see the Nik Collecion in selective tools, but some of the options will not work for example Color Efex Pro 4.
Please can you help. The PC being used has the following system. AMD ATHLON (TM) 11 x 2270. 3.42 GHZ 1.75 GB of RAM
Susan, you should REALLY replace your computer with something newer.
Don´t have to be top of the line but at least run windows 10 and have minimum 8Gb of ram and an SSD drive.
Get a Adobe Creative Cloud licence for lightroom+photoshop for around 10usd a month and it runs current version of Niksoftware plugins flawlessly.
Get a surface pro 4 with a core i5 8gb ram and 256gb SSD and you should be good for all kinds of work on the road.
Seems latest MBP´s running latest version of OSX is out of luck since they seem to struggle getting the plugins to work, guess it´s the price you pay for running with apple products haha!
January 10, 2017. Do we know yet whether Google plans to support Nik to the extent that it will continue to work on new versions of operating systems and perhaps even new versions of Adobe? Primary concern for me is the Silver EFEX. I’m planning to begin to use it but don’t want to waste my time if it will just crap out with the next rev of Mac OS.
Thanks,
Art
Good news….. Bad news! Good news first Free indeed and one of the best, most useful plug-in set out there! Some very skilled individuals have had their hands all over this set. When I’ve had to pay for this item you always wondered as time went on,how NIK could make this set any better! Bad news… when NIK sold the system every one had high hopes that Google would once again improve the set. Never happen and worse no longer supports it! Simply time is now totally against NIK plug-in and all of those who love to use them!
The Nik Collection has problems installing into the latest version of Affinity Photo. Two separate posters to utube tried, one was able to install the complete collection, the other was only able to install two presets. The rest reported as non working. See Affinity Photo Tips on utube
Absolutely fantastic news! Finally we can use nik software for free.
My site: imagestudio.com/photography/
I am having a hard time with the Nik collection, I have windows 10 plus Elements 10 and 11 lightroom 5.7 and lightroom 6 when I downloaded Nik it only gives me one program to put it on and that’s elements and that gives me a full menu on the side of the screen of Elements 10.I need to add the other programs like lightroom both of them.When if I go to lightroom I need to go to edit in then it only offers one of the collection I have no idea what I need to do Still no screen.Help Thanks
Nasim, could we get a petition going via PL to request that Google provide minor updates to ensure that Nik Collection continues to work with current and future Windows and OSX versions?
They could provide a web page to allow end users to report issues that are found going forward, which would make the process easier.
I know it’s a bit of a long shot, but Google must have the knowledge in-house to do this sort of thing, as they’re already doing it for their other stuff like Chrome browser.
It would be such a shame if Nik Collection faded away due to future OS incompatibility.
There were initial positive signs last year that it would get a patch to run on OSX 10.11, but nothing seems to have come of it thus far.
Richie
I have used Vivesa for many years and love it. In May 2013 I received an email from Nik offering a download of their full collection of software. This was about the time of the Google takeover. The download was in March 2013 , it was referred to as NikCollection_1.007_22671_full and the size was 100,838 kb. This new download is nikcollection-full-1.2.11 and is 4 x the size at 439,524 kb so it seems that considerable development has taken place under google. I have not installed the new download yet.
It appears that there has been considerable development of Nik software since the acquisition by google. I have used Vivesa for 5 or 6 years. In March 2013, about the time of the Google acquisition , I received an email from Nik offering a full download of their programs gratis. There was no explanation attached. That download was Nikcollection_1.007_22671_win_full and file size was 100,838 kb. This new download is more than 4X the size at 439,524 kb and is designated Nikcollection-full-1.2.11. This sems to indicate that a lot of work has gone into the Nik collection since acquisition by Google. Hope they keep it up.