Nik Collection 5 brings major redesign to Color Efex and Analog Efex with smoother user experience

DxO has announced the newest Nik Collection 5 release. The familiar 8-tool suite of plugins for Photoshop and Lightroom also comes with a brand new haze reduction tool and 29 “faithfully reproduced colour film grains” for your retro editing pleasure. The plugins also all act as standalone apps outside of the Adobe ecosystem, with access to over 300 presets and an array of intuitive sliders to tweak your images.

For long-time users, you might see some big changes as the user interfaces of Nik Color Efex and Analog Efex have been rebuilt from the ground up. Of course, they will steel somewhat familiar to some of you as they’ve been redesigned to fall more in line with the recently updated Silver Efex and Viveza applications.

Color Efex now includes new ClearView technology to remove haze such as fog, mist, smoke and pollution. It’s intelligently removed using a simple slider to help return contrast and colour to your images shot in less than ideal conditions. 29 new colour film grains created in DxO’s lab give those analogue retro photographers some new creative options for processing their images to simulate that film look.

Perspective Efex adds 20 new cameras and 60 new lenses to its database of equipment with more than 4,300 new camera and lens combinations also added to help automatically correct for geometric distortions in your images. This brings up the total number of camera and lens combinations supported up to over 70,000.

Finally, Nik Collection gains a new family member. DxO PhotoLab 5 Essential joins the deal as an extra free inclusion. DxO have specifically avoided trying to use terms like “bundles” with this one because it’s not an extra package above and beyond the basic that happens to include PhotoLab 5 and it doesn’t increase the cost of Nik Collection 5. It’s just a new addition to the pack that’s included in the price to give Nik Collection users more options when shooting raw.

Nik Collection 5 is available to buy now for Windows and macOS for $149 for a new license. Or, existing users can upgrade from Nik Collection 4 for the price of $79.