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Google's $149 Nik Photo Editing Suite Goes Free
Google has announced that it is making its $149 Nik Collection photo editing suite available for free of charge. The move, which should make plenty of amateur and professional photographers happy, comes roughly three and a half years after Google acquired Nik Software. The suite includes seven desktop plugins and allows you to add effects and apply filters to your photos. Those of you who had purchased Nik Software, the company assures that it will issue a full refund. In a blog post, the company writes: 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.
In other words, they dont want to support or develop it any more and now they can point to the Free price tag for justification.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
So, the obvious question now is "when is it discontinued"?
Because that seam to be the ultimate end for most of Googles projects. Especially these who isn't cloud related, like this. I would be surprised if this isn't killed of within 5 years.
For instance, they have only recently killed of the desktop Picasa application - a really good and free solution to organize your pictures. And now they want us to use other software that probably will be discontinued in the future whey you rely on it?
This is cool and all, but for those who don't read TFS (let alone TFA), you may want to look at the requirements (bottom of page), and you'll discover that you will need either Photoshop of some flavor installed (no effing way I'm coughing up money to Adobe for just a hobby), or Aperture for OSX.
BTW, no love for GIMP? dafuq?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Likely. However, as a photographer and image processing professional, I can vouch for both Viveza and DFine. Both are worthy of use in many situations. The rest aren't much, IMHO, but those two are exceptionally useful as often as not.
Viveza is a somewhat-automatic region selecting modifier of basic image characteristics such as contrast, saturation and so on.
Dfine is a reasonably effective noise reduction tool.
Perfect, no, and I rather see them further developed as opposed to abandoned, as is quite possible due to Google's well known habit, but as they stand now, better to have them in the imaging toolbox than not.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Just keep in mind that "killed off" doesn't mean "I can't use it any longer" in the case of a desktop tool. I've been using these for years and will continue using them for years without any concern at all about what Google, or Nik before them, might do or not do with future versions, marketing, or availability.
For web products, certainly. But these aren't that, or at least, the versions I have that I bought from Nik aren't that. I suppose they could have mutated?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Nik isn't a photo editing suite, it is a suite of Photoshop filters (pro quality) that let you add effects to photos.
Without Photoshop, they're useless.
-Styopa
Of course, since we are a larger corporation, we haven't notified everyone internally yet... http://imgur.com/WfJuPUw
In other words, they dont want to support or develop it any more and now they can point to the Free price tag for justification.
And what is the problem with this? You would prefer they keep it closed source even as their own interest in it ramps down?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Normally for mobile apps, which also run locally, google pushes out updates that lock in the eventual shutdown before they announce it.
If you have an old pre-google desktop version... keep a backup. :)
Which widely available, free or low-cost photo editors, will support these plug-ins with a minimum of hassle? I am thinking of programs like Paint.NET, Paint Shop Pro.