And some make me wonder if anyone at DXO actually uses the product, as they make the product harder to use. Some things are definitely better – it offers a full screen display. It’s useful if you don’t own DXO Viewpoint but redundant if you do. This addition adds the functionality of DXO Viewpoint to Nik. Last year, they added Perspective Efex to the package. Since acquiring NIK in 2017, DXO have released various upgrades that fixed bugs and improved compatibility with tools such as Affinity Photo. They have now released the latest update to the NIK Collection – a suite of excellent tools for image enhancement, noise removal, sharpening, HDR and perspective correction. I praised DXO’s last Photo Lab release, because it contained a decent set of extra features. Skylum has re-released Luminar as Luminar AI and added very little to it, if truth be told.

Since that post, Topaz have (controversially) switched their most popular products to a perpetual license but you have to pay to receive updates after a year.

But it’s hard to keep adding additional features to mature products… Back in 2019, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek post entitled Is This The End For Photo Software Companies? where I argued that software houses not offering subscriptions were under pressure to release ‘new’ versions of their software annually, in order to keep the money flowing in.

Dxo nik collection