Nik Collection by Dx0 Black Friday 50% off

[nardes]

Looks like the folks at Dx0 are offering the Nik Collection at 50% off.

https://nikcollection.dxo.com/

Was 149 now is 74.99 US$

Promo until 2nd Dec I believe.

Cheers

Dennis

[Tannin]

Good tip, Dennis.

One thing to watch out for - practically a scam actually - is the bundle on offer. DxO have added PhotoLab (a raw converter, more or less) into the package. It costs more than $100. So what they are actually offering is the $100 Nic Collection and the $100 raw converter both for $100. ($115 to be precise.) So on the face of things, this isn't really a 50% discount, it's full price for the Nic Collection with a raw converter you probably didn't want thrown in.

But hang that. I bought it anyway. My reasons? Well, I own the excellent Tony Kuyper collection and the flashy-trashy Topaz Suite, but in practice I nearly always end up using my very old version of the Nic Collection instead, because it's familiar and because I just like the way it works. So wouldn't it make sense to get the current version of the software I actually use?

Also - who knows? - PhotoLab might evolve into a package capable of replacing Photoshop for my purposes, and I'd dearly love to get rid of Photoshop, largely because I despise having to rent software.

The Nic Collection 2 installs fuss-free and works just as you'd expect. I haven't played with PhotoLab for more than a few minutes, so can't say anything much about it. In reality, I'll doubtless keep using Camera Raw most of the time.

[arthurking83]

Photolab is more directly a competitor to Lightroom, than Photoshop.

If you use photoshop for pixel replacing duties(like replace skies, and other such heavy manipulations .. Photolab won't work for 'ya.

I have Photolab, as a raw processor .. infinitely better than Lr is(was) in terms of workflow ... primarily the annoying need to catalogue everything in Lr.
But some actual tool methodologies inherent to Photolab, made for an easier time of it all.

I never bothered with the Nik collection part of it tho, could be a useful tho.

Since Nikon added colour control points into CaptureNX-D, I've stopped using Photolab, still installed tho(always will be) as it can come in handy.

[jim]

I don't know what's included in the (Essential) version but the full version of Photolab has 2 very useful features. First the very good collection of lens profiles that allows it to do a good job of distortion correction and sharpening; and second the Prime noise reduction which is the only noise reduction I've ever found that I'm happy to use on detailed areas of an image.