Late last month, DxO announced that it has acquired the Nik Collection from Google. As a direct result of this acquisition, it seems, Nik Software’s U Point interface technology is now included in DxO’s flagship image processing software, along with a name change of that software from DxO Optics Pro to DxO PhotoLab.
The Nik Collection had a solid reputation as a suite of excellent image editing tools, and I came close to buying it when it was still produced by its creators, Nik Software. After Google acquired Nik Software in 2012, it looked like there would be no further development of the Nik Collection. I’m confident that DxO is going to be more active on this front than Google appeared to be. For many photographers, DxO’s acquisition of the Nik Collection will be exciting news.
As things stand, though, I haven’t bought any new photographic software for some years now. The time that I do spend on photography has gone into practising my shooting skills and streamlining my post-processing workflow, which is currently a three-stage process: (1) DxO Optics Pro 9 for conversion from RAW to JPEG; (2) Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for the bulk of the editing; and (3) Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 for cataloguing. If you’re familiar with those applications, you’ll know that they are all at least a few years old—and in the case of Photoshop Elements 6, almost a decade old. Currently, all of my photographic work is naturalistic in style, so I don’t use highly-specialised software.
Although I don’t have the need for such tools just now, I’ll be watching further development of the Nik Collection and DxO PhotoLab with interest.