Nik Collection: The Bell Tolls For Thee…
Don’t know if you heard, but silently in the dark of night last week, Google snuck in and snuffed out the last flickering candle of hope that many longtime users of the Nik Collection of plug-ins (for Lightroom and Photoshop) had been clinging to, when they publically announced (right at the top of their downloads page) that they would no longer support the Nik Collection or offer any updates going forward. A moment of silence for the Collection. It is officially a dead.
Today, over on my daily blog, I did a full-blown Q&A and if you’ve got a sec, it’s worth bouncing over there for all the whys and whatfors (and for what I’m using as my Nik ColorEfex Pro 4 replacement).
BTW: Sorry, I missed out on my Friday post last week (when all this came down). I was up in NYC on business, and my wife and daughter flew up so we could catch some Broadway shows, and give our daughter her first real taste of the city that never sleeps. She loved it!!! We all did. What a great town — what a great weekend! Still glad to be back home. 🙂
Hope you all have a great Monday, and let’s pour a glass for what as perhaps the greatest collection of plug-ins, ever.
Best,
-Scott
[…] Back on Monday I did a post about which filters you’d use in MacPhun’s Luminar to get the looks we used to get in Nik ColorEfex Pro 4 (my go-to effects plug-in for years, until it started slowly dying on my, and many other folks, version of Photoshop and Lightroom, and Google just announced they are not going to release any fixes. Basically, it’s dead). […]
Actually, it wasn’t last week that it happened I saw it on their website about a month ago.
The main problem looking for a replacement, is that there are several alternatives, but these alternatives, like On1, Luminar, etc. are not really alternatives to just the NIK Photoshop Plug-Ins, but they include a whole image processing Suite. Those of us who use the Lightroom+Photoshop combo, and wish to to continue using it, have no use to a whole new image processing Suite product. What we need, and want, is just the Plug-Íns replacement part, and that´s not available as such, that I know of. That is the real problem.
What happens to Snapseed, then?
If Nik stops working, what happens to PSDs embedding Nik smart filters? Can they still be rasterized without the tools able to operate? Do I need to proactively trawl my catalog and get rid of Nik smart filters before it dies?
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Lament fellow photographers but remember that the suite will still work in its grand fashion for years. It is not camera profile or stand alone dependent so will always open your files from Lr and Ps. Keep enjoying it for what it offers! Get recipes from the web. Never delete it.
Surely no guarantee it will work with future versions of LR & PS going forward?
There is no guarantee but I still use a plugin that to this day says it was made for CS3, Windows Vista, and Intel Mac. I imagine that it will be a while before they stop working.
[…] As I predicted three years ago, Google ends support for Nik Software. […]
Does this mean we should uninstall them? If so, what is the best way to do this?
Just keep using them until they stop working.
One thing that nobody else does are the NIK “Control Points”. It is a unique feature that permeates all NIK software, including Viveza. I used that feature all the time, and I will miss it very much. No other masking tool -that I know of- equals that today.
YES! THIS! The control points technique is a killer, and masking can’t touch it. Hoping for a white knight company to swoop in and commit to maintaining these filters
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There’s a petition (https://www.change.org/p/google-inc-save-the-nik-collection) asking Google to save NIK. If they even released the code as Open Source it would help.