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Google's $149 Nik Photo Editing Suite Goes Free

Posted by msmash on from the this-should-make-me-a-good-photographer dept.

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.

3 of 52 comments (clear)

  1. Bah - they're just plugins, and no Linux. by Penguinisto · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?
    1. Re:Bah - they're just plugins, and no Linux. by bmo · · Score: 5, Informative

      > Photoshop of some flavor installed (no effing way I'm coughing up money to Adobe for just a hobby)

      It's called CS2.

      Create Adobe account
      Lie and say you already bought CS2
      Be brought to the download page
      Download. Input free key supplied from Adobe.

      ???

      Slight Profit. It's good enough for hobbyist work - it doesn't have all the latest bells and whistles (no video card acceleration, etc). But hey, it's free-beer free.

      >no love for Gimp

      Install PSPI in Gimp.

      http://the-tml.net/gimp/pspi.h...

      I love Gimp and am kinda proficient at it, but then also, CS2 runs great in Wine.

      --
      BMO

  2. Re:I don't see the problem... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's still closed-source. It's now free-to-use though.