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.

Comments

When is it discontinued?

[spyfrog]

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?

Opportunity

[fyngyrz]

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.