Software
Once thought to be gone for good after Google marked the program for discontinuation, the DxO Nik Collection suite of plug-ins has a handful of new options. This week, the company announced several updates to its
DxO Nik Collection 4.3, the Photoshop plug-in suite it bought from Google in 2017, as well as a few enhancements to PhotoLab 5.1 and FilmPack 6.1. The update adds 32 nature-themed presets to the Nik Collection.
The DxO Nik Collection 4.3 focuses on landscape and travel photography, with several of the new presets designed to exaggerate the look of certain times of day or times of the year. The HDR Efex Pro, for example, gains a handful of new presets in a Tonal Landscape collection. These options are designed to work on landscapes within a specific category, including one for enhancing golden hour, another for Blue Hour, and one for spring greens.

On the heels of Photoshop’s AI-powered season-changing filters, the four new presets in Nik Color Efex are designed to bring out the tones of a particular season. The presets don’t fake snow, for example, but adds in cool tones for the winter preset. The autumn preset slides the green tones towards red, orange, and yellow in what DxO describes as an “authentic sense.” Spring and Summer, meanwhile, draw out different shades of green.
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The presets heading to Nik Viveza are made for local edits using the program’s U-Point tool to select parts of the images. One, for example, is made to draw out the blue of the sky while another is meant to be applied to a forest. HDR Efex adds five new “Tonal Landscape” options. Two of the presets aim to create a golden hour and blue hour effect, respectively.

The update also brings six landscape presets to the black-and-white-focused Silver Efex. Another six that are new to Analog Efex are designed to give landscapes a look of old colored film.
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DxO’s own PhotoLab also sees an incremental update, which means that version 5.1 is free to users of PhotoLab 5. The update adds a tool to display geo-tagged images on Google Maps. The user interface also sees some refinements, as well as support for recently launched cameras, from the Canon EOS R3 to the Fujifilm GFX 50S II.
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FilmPack 6.1, DxO’s platform for creating looks based on real film, sees a user interface enhancement with one-click option for Time Machine, a feature that launched with the previous version to organize film looks by era.
All three program updates are available now on the company’s website. The Nik Collection is currently discounted to $99.99; ($59.99 for current users to upgrade) until the end of the month. DxO PhotoLab 5.1 is discounted to starting at $110 for new customers and FilmPack 6 is discounted to $54.99. Both programs also have cheaper upgrade options for users of the older versions.