This 8-plugin package has transformed my photography workflow in Photoshop

The Nik Collection, a venerable suite of image-editing plugins for Photoshop and other similar apps, has reached version 8, 12 years after its initial release as a collection. As the name suggests, it’s not just one app but eight, each focused on an individual aspect of image editing and finely crafted to carry it out. Version 8 doesn’t add anything new over V7 in terms of raw functionality, but offers an improved interface, increased speed, and a greater focus on Photoshop integration at the expense of other apps.

And that’s the key to the Nik Collection - while you could, possibly, use the plugins in their standalone form, it makes much more sense to have them act as plugins for another app, making the round trip from one to another as necessary. While there is support here for Affinity Photo and DxO’s own Photolab software, the main beneficiary of the new functionality is Adobe. It might not make it onto our list of the best photo-editing software, as it’s a bit too specialised, but it is immensely powerful nonetheless, and it will, by its very nature, work seamlessly on the best laptops for Photoshop.

Key specifications

Setup & getting started

• Installs as a Photoshop plugin
• Can be used as standalone apps

The Nik Collection is the easiest thing in the world to install - you download a file and run it. In the case of the Mac Studio I’m using for this review that means a DMG file. During the installation process it detects compatible image-editing apps installed on your system and sets up its plugins for them.

And rather than paying an annual subscription, the Nik Collection is available for a one-off payment. There's even a free trial. It's a wonderful callback to the way creative software used to be sold.

The plugins appear on the Filter menu in Photoshop, under their own little Nik Collection heading, and on the Plugins menu too. They integrate themselves into the app’s interface with their own panels that can be docked on the palette stack, and you’ll be able to keep the ones you use regularly there. It’s reasonably unlikely that every single member of the collection will be useful to you: the denoising plugin DFine might not get a lot of use if you’re a fan of Camera Raw’s AI denoising, for example, especially as Nik can’t open raw files, but you’ll coalesce around a group that suits your style of photography and the way you like to work.

Once you’ve selected the plugin you want from the menu, it doesn’t open in it immediately - this is because the Photoshop panels have a new trick: they contain one-click shortcuts to presets you’ve added to a favourites list, as well as the ability to choose from among the last 15 edits you’ve made and re-apply them to a file. You can click the Open button to dive straight in too. Once the plugin app is open, you have to finish up there before you can return to working on the file in Photoshop - you’re locked out of the host app.

Getting started score: 4/5

Features

• A plugin for everything
• You may not use them all

So what do all these plugins go? Well, Analog Efex is for making your photos look like they came from a vintage film camera, the sort of thing Instagram used to get mocked for doing but an order of magnitude more sophisticated, with film simulations and light leaks and the ability to add dust and scratches in various patterns. I particularly like its double exposure capabilities, which zoom and twirl a duplicate of your image, blurring and blending it with the original.

Color Efex is for generating cross-processing effects and darkroom tricks such as bleach bypass in colour photos, while Viveza is similar but is really all about adjusting the colours in an image. Silver Efex changes your images into black and white, with a host of presets and plenty of tools to adjust contrast and map colours to grey levels. Phew.

DFine reduces the digital noise from high ISO, and can come in handy if you’ve been forced to raise your camera’s ISO to prevent motion blur. HDR Efex enables the creation of HDR images, just like the Tone Mapping Persona in Affinity Photo and able to be used from File > Automate in Photoshop just like the native HDR merging. Then there's Sharpener, which has a presharpener and an output sharpener, and which will crisp up your images depending on which display device or media you have in mind. It’s a lot.

All the plugins share common interface modules. Alongside the main image preview window in the centre, there are presets and filters on the left, to give you a starting point in your edits, and sliders and options on the left that allow you to fine-tune the look you’re seeking.

New in version 8 of the collection is the ability to take Photoshop selections into the plugins and work with them there, something that Creative Cloud subscribers will likely find extremely useful, and cementing Photoshop’s status as Nik’s favourite app. If you haven’t already made a mask before invoking the plugin, you’ll still be able to selectively edit your image once you’re there before passing that selection between the different plugins, and there's a new colour mask tool that allows you to apply changes only to selected colour ranges as well as a control polygon for tricky shapes and control points for separating bright areas from darker ones.

Your edits can be saved off as a full-res TIFF file at any point, and this button is kept well away from the Apply button that returns you to your host app so that you don’t press it by mistake. Your edited images can also be returned to Photoshop as layers (with and without masks) or smart objects, and you can send layers to your Photoshop composition at any time, without having to close the plugin.

Features score: 5/5

User experience

• App-switching is very fast
• Deep Photoshop integration

We’ve all got a preferred way of working, and using the Nik Collection may well not fit in with your workflow due to the way it flips from app to app. What it does do, however, is to make this flipping as seamless as possible. The plugin apps startup quickly, and the way they’re integrated with Photoshop means it’s really no different to opening up the Filter Gallery, or using Camera Raw as a filter.

That all the different plugins share a common look is another point in its favour. It may take a little time to get used to, but once you’ve got favourites set up, and the plugins you use most often pinned to the interface in Photoshop, it can become just as fast as developing a raw in Camera Raw and hitting the Open button to take it to Photoshop’s main window.

The complete lack of generative AI in the collection may also endear it to people. Where Adobe has taken the plunge into the microplastic-infested ocean of AI from a great height, Nik Collection relies on good old-fashioned masking skill, artistic judgement and the mark one human eyeball to achieve its results. In an industry where the use of AI to get amazing results is possible but derided, being able to say you did everything yourself is becoming ever more important.

As such, the Collection isn’t the sort of toolset that will be used to quickly process hundreds of images, though that could be possible with the ability to add lists of favourites and access them with a click. Instead, it’s the sort of app that will see favoured photos elevated to a new level of art, its tools used for subtle effects as well as huge changes.

User experience score: 4/5

Who is it for?

• Photographers and photo editors

No one else but someone who spends their time creating incredible still images will want this collection, but for those who can take advantage of its powerful editing tools, and integrate it into their workflow, it’s the sort of app that will be forever unveiling new levels of usefulness.

Buy it if...

• You’re looking for a way to add functionality to Photoshop
• You don’t want to touch generative AI
• You don’t mind switching between apps

Don't buy it if...

• You want to create with AI
• You’re not a Photoshop fan
• The built-in tools of your preferred app do what you need