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While free, it was never a good fit for the search engine goliath and it languished, until DxO brought it under its wing, issuing a slew of welcome updates over the last couple of years. Nik Software originally launched the Nik Collection, then it was acquired by Google and offered as a free download. They are are divided into five series, each with five Presets: “Classic Portrait Color,” “Classic Portrait Black & White,” “Light & Bright,” “Wildlife,” and “Street.” This version includes a pack of 25 new Presets for Color Efex Pro and Silver Efex Pro. It is hard to believe that the software has been around for 25 years, and to mark its silver jubilee, DxO has released its latest 3.3 version.
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As well as plug-ins, you can use the tools in the Nik Collection as stand-alone applications. Our favourites include Silver Efex Pro for black and white editing, Analog Efex Pro for old-school film effects and Perspective Efex Pro, which is one of the best tools around for correcting perspective and converging verticals. As regular readers will know, we are big fans of the Nik Collection from DxO here at AP – it offers a wide range of very useful editing plug ins for Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom and DxO PhotoLab.
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