Google's Nik Collection, a photo editing software package designed for professional photographers, once retailed for $149. Today it's absolutely free to download, for both Windows and Mac users.

Here you can read Google's announcement, which includes more information on the software package and its capabilities.

Today we’re making the Nik Collection available to everyone, for free. Photo enthusiasts all over the world use the Nik Collection to get the best out of their images every day. As we continue to focus our long-term investments in building incredible photo editing tools for mobile, including Google Photos and Snapseed, we’ve decided to make the Nik Collection desktop suite available for free, so that now anyone can use it.





The Nik Collection is comprised of seven desktop plug-ins that provide a powerful range of photo editing capabilities -- from filter applications that improve color correction, to retouching and creative effects, to image sharpening that brings out all the hidden details, to the ability to make adjustments to the color and tonality of images. Starting March 24, 2016, the latest Nik Collection will be freely available to download: Analog Efex Pro, Color Efex Pro, Silver Efex Pro, Viveza, HDR Efex Pro, Sharpener Pro and Dfine. If you purchased the Nik Collection in 2016, you will receive a full refund, which we’ll automatically issue back to you in the coming days. We’re excited to bring the powerful photo editing tools once only used by professionals to even more people now.

Once you've downloaded the software, head over to the Nik Collection channel on YouTube where you'll find video tutorials, including the one below called "Introduction to the Nik Complete Collection." It's a good place to start.

PS: Some readers have asked whether this software can work as a standalone program, or whether it needs to run with a program like Photoshop. Here's what PC Magazine has to say about that: "Though you can run the seven different plugins in the collection as standalone products, they tend to work better when you integrate them into an existing image editing program, like Adobe's PhotoShop. '(On Windows) You can make shortcuts to the individual .exe files on your desktop and then just drag stacks of images onto them,' suggested one Google+ user." In short, you have some options.

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