I’m a bit late on this one, but DXO, earlier this week, announced Nik Collection 6. I’ve been using Nik Collection for years, before it was even bought by Google!!. It's a bit of a Swiss Army knife for photographers, and in recent years, DXO has been updating it pretty regularly.

If you’re unfamiliar with the NIK collection, it includes eight individual apps that can be used alone or as plugins within popular photo editing software like Adobe Lightroom Classic and Photoshop. These apps cover everything from simple editing of colour, tonality, and sharpness, to HDR effects, denoising, geometry, and more.

screenshot of DXO Nik software showing u0-point technology upgrade

One of the key features of Nik Collection is the U Point™ technology. It's the most intuitive tool for local adjustments in photo editing. In Nik Collection 6, U Point has been upgraded with new functionality to make selective edits even more intuitive. Here are some of the key upgrades:

NEW Control Lines add flexibility when making broad adjustments, bringing the power of Control Points to linear gradients
NEW Control Point diffusion features mean you can regulate the strength and style of adjustments more easily
NEW Control Points and Control Lines can now be inverted, giving you huge flexibility when editing
NEW Color Selectivity sliders allow Control Point and Control Line editing to be tied to specific colors and tones in an image
NEW Renamable Local Adjustments let you stay on top of complex edits, so you’ll never lose sight of your work
NEW Local Adjustments can now be saved as Presets, giving you quick access to your most frequently used edits.

Also new in this release, is the ability to choose where sliders for local adjustments appear on screen. You can keep the controls in a sidebar to keep the image area clean, or overlay them on top of the image in the traditional Nik Collection style.

There are several new workflow features in this release. You can turn your edits into a Smart Object at any stage from within the plugin, giving you fully non-destructive editing in Photoshop. You can also call on any of your last 15 Nik Collection edits and apply them with a single click. Plus, presets can now be searched for by name so you can instantly find your favorite edits. You can now also choose Affinity Photo as a host application during the installation process.

Five of the eight plugins that make up Nik Collection 6 have received individual feature upgrades. From the press release:

Nik Color Efex gains a brand-new Hue/Saturation/Luminance tool, for deeper and more accurate control of color and tone
Nik Dfine receives a complete visual overhaul bringing it into line with the other plugins, creating a more refined experience as well as improved options for saving denoising recipes and returning to them in just a few clicks
Nik Perspectiveadds the powerful new ReShape Tool which allows photographers to warp and shape local areas for complete precision
Nik Sharpener will also be receiving a rebuild and interface overhaul, destined for Nik 6.2, and available as a free update
Nik HDR Efex, the premier tool for exposure blending, also gets a fresh new interface as part of version 6.3 (arriving in August), providing a clearer, faster workflow.

Nik Collection 6 is available now for Windows and macOS, exclusively from the DxO website. It's priced at £135.00, but owners of Nik Collection 4 or 5 can take advantage of a special upgrade price of £69.00. The best part? Nik Collection 6 doesn't require a subscription and can be installed on up to three computers.

For more information visit the DXO website.