Nik software is one of the heavy hitters in the Lightroom and Photoshop plugin world. They are so big that in 2012, the company was bought up by Google. After Google's acquisition, they lowered the price for all the desktop plugins and made their mobile app (Snapseed) free of charge. Now, four years later, Google has decided to bring their desktop plugins into line with their mobile application by making all of them free.
Today we’re making the Nik Collection available to everyone, for free.
Photo enthusiasts all over the world use the Nik Collection to get the best out of their images every day. As we continue to focus our long-term investments in building incredible photo editing tools for mobile, including Google Photos and Snapseed, we’ve decided to make the Nik Collection desktop suite available for free, so that now anyone can use it.
The Nik Collection is comprised of seven desktop plug-ins that provide a powerful range of photo editing capabilities -- from filter applications that improve color correction, to retouching and creative effects, to image sharpening that brings out all the hidden details, to the ability to make adjustments to the color and tonality of images.
Starting March 24, 2016, the latest Nik Collection will be freely available to download: Analog Efex Pro, Color Efex Pro, Silver Efex Pro, Viveza, HDR Efex Pro, Sharpener Pro and Dfine. If you purchased the Nik Collection in 2016, you will receive a full refund, which we’ll automatically issue back to you in the coming days.
We’re excited to bring the powerful photo editing tools once only used by professionals to even more people now.
This is great news for everyone that recently purchased the suite of plugins, and even greater news for everyone that has been wanting the plugins but never pulled the trigger on buying them. This does leave us all with a question, though: Will Google continue to develop these plugins? Or, when they say “focus our long-term investments in building incredible photo editing tools for mobile,” do they mean they will no longer develop the desktop applications? Either way, the entire set of plugins is already fantastic, so hit the link and get your copy up and running.
I haven't seen anything about a trial and it's still working for me.
When i open the app in PS, it says you have 15 days trial left, and below that it gives you to option to buy or demo.