DxO Nik Collection 9 review: "This suite’s best plug-ins are enough to make it worth buying – even on their own!"

With the exception of Adobe Photoshop, Nik Collection is perhaps the oldest photo-editing tool on the market. And yet, thanks to DxO's constant development, it remains right at the forefront of creative photographic techniques, embracing analog effects, contemporary photographic styles and effects, and some of the best black and white editing tools you can get.

You can use the Nik Collection plug-ins from within Adobe Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and Affinity. However, each plug-in will also work as a standalone application, so you can use them as external editors for programs like Capture One, which don't support Photoshop-style plug-ins.

So just how good is the Nik Collection, how do its plug-ins stack up today, and does it still deserve to be considered among the best photo editing software applications on the market?

DxO Nik Collection 9: System requirements

Compatible host applications for plug-in: DxO PhotoLab 8 and DxO PhotoLab 9, Adobe Photoshop 2025, 2026, Adobe Photoshop Elements 2025 and Adobe Photoshop Elements 2026, Adobe Lightroom Classic 2025, 2026, Serif Affinity Photo 1 and 2, and Affinity by Canva (NB: Nik HDR Efex merge feature and Nik Collection Switch to mode are not compatible with Affinity).

DxO Nik Collection 9: Price

Nik Collection 9 costs $179.99 / £149.99 (about AU$257) for a new licence, while existing Nik Collection 7/8 owners can upgrade for $99.99 / £79.99 (about AU$143). It’s not especially cheap, especially considering you might not get full use out of all the plug-ins, but the creative tools, controls and presets in Analog Efex, Color Efex and Silver Efex are so good that you could argue they carry the whole suite on their own.

The upgrade price for existing users is fair, too, given that this is a substantial upgrade, but given that the Nik Collection plug-ins are not dependent on updates for new cameras and lenses, say (that’s handled by your host software), even older versions may offer all the creative inspiration you need right now.

DxO Nik Collection 9: Interface and usability

What I would call the ‘core’ plug-ins – Analog Efex, Color Efex and Silver Efex – adopt the same interface setup, so it’s easy to swap between them. You have preset effects and individual filters in the left sidebar and a filter ‘stack’ in the right sidebar. This shows all the filters and settings applied by the current preset – and you can edit these at will – or the settings for any filters you select and apply manually. It’s a straightforward system used almost universally by effects software.

Each of the filters you apply can have its own masks, or local adjustments, and in Nik Collection 9 these include AI masks alongside DxO’s regular non-AI control point, control line and control polygon masks. Wisely, I think, DxO has kept the AI masking options simple, with basic object selection and area selection options, and no attempt at subject recognition. This makes the new AI masking both powerful enough and simple enough to be genuinely useful.

HDR Efex hasn’t seen any major changes for some time, and while the craze for HDR might have faded somewhat (thank goodness), it still does a good job. As usual for HDR applications, it invents some tools and adjustments you won’t see in regular photo editors, but it doesn’t take too long to work out what everything does.

Viveza is a bit of an oddity. It’s set up for detailed global and local color adjustments, but that’s pretty much all it does. It’s the kind of thing you might do in your host software instead, or Color Efex – indeed, three of Viveza’s core adjustments are now included in Color Efex’s list of filters. Viveza is easy enough to use but hardly seems to do enough to justify its inclusion as a separate plug-in.

Dfine is distinctly disappointing too. Superficially, it looks like a powerful little plug-in that can analyze the noise profile of the image you’re working on and apply a tailored noise reduction process both globally and locally. However, it only works on already-processed images, so it’s trying to fix a problem too late. It can’t reconstruct lost detail either, in the way that today’s AI raw denoising tools can, so it does feel like a relic of a different age.

Sharpener is interesting for its ability to tailor the sharpening level for different output devices. You can sharpen for screen output, though with today’s website content management systems and social channels, you don’t have a lot of control over the sizes images are displayed at. This could be useful for prints, though curiously it doesn’t display image size sliders by default.

DxO Nik Collection 9: Performance

There are two aspects to any software application’s performance – its speed and responsiveness and the quality of the results. Speedwise, I found it OK but not instantaneous. Analog Efex presets took a couple of seconds to apply, for example, and this was on a 32GB M2 Max Mac Studio. Some of these processes are complex, though, so you can’t expect too much.

The results, at least from Analog Efex, Color Efex and Silver Efex, are stellar. Analog Efex recreates the look and feel of old analog processes and cameras brilliantly – it’s way better, in my opinion, than DxO’s rather dour FilmPack application. It’s a shame the new Halation filter in Nik Collection 9 didn’t appear here rather than Color Efex, since halation is really an analog effect.

Color Efex offers a huge range of more contemporary photo effects, from film simulations (modern and vintage) through graduated filters, tonal contrast enhancement, and so much more. It’s a shame that the new Glass filter in Analog Efex wasn’t used here because it’s a graphic style that might suit Color Efex’s approach better. There’s also some crossover – Color Efex’s Old Photo filter is really good, and Analog Efex doesn’t have anything quite like it. There are some filters you might never use (Duplex? Color Styliser? Indian Summer?), but overall there’s so much in Color Efex that you might never exhaust its potential.

This has been magnified massively by another new feature in Nik Collection 9 – blend modes. Each filter can be assigned a blend mode (not just ‘Normal’ now), which completely changes the way it interacts with the image. For example, the paper textures in Analog Efex take on a whole new life with different blend modes.

Silver Efex, meanwhile, continues to shine as perhaps the best tool there is for black and white photography fans. It can reveal depth and tonality in black and white images that’s hard to replicate in other software. It also uses sliders and adjustments that seem to speak directly to darkroom photographers and how they think, with dedicated film types and grain patterns. It would be nice if there was some kind of blur/bokeh tool and a wider choice of border styles, though.

DxO Nik Collection 9: Verdict

The Nik Collection does feel like a plug-in suite of two halves. Analog Efex, Color Efex and Silver Efex are the creative center, and offer presets, filters and inspiration that’s hard to find anywhere else. HDR Efex is a good tool for an image style that’s perhaps gone out of fashion, and Viveza, Dfine and Sharpener definitely feel past their sell-by dates. Would I buy the Nik Collection for Analog Efex, Color Efex and Silver Efex alone? Yes, I probably would.

Alternatives

ON1 Photo RAW 2026 MAX comes with a set of plug-ins for Lightroom and Photoshop, which includes its excellent Effects module. This rivals the Nik Collection for filters, controls and creative inspiration, though ON1’s AI masking options can leave your brain reeling.

Adobe Lightroom doesn't match the Nik Collection for creative tools and effects, but it does offer a wide range of presets and effects in a simple non-destructive workflow.