Whoa. Google just announced that it’s making its Nik Collection of desktop photo editing software 100% free.



You may remember that Google acquired Nik Software and its popular Snapseed photo editing app back in September 2012. Although Google killed off Snapseed for Desktop in March 2013, it was still big news when Google started selling the entire Nik suite (originally valued at around $500) for the “low price” of $150 later that month.

Now it’s free.

“Photo enthusiasts all over the world use the Nik Collection to get the best out of their images every day,” Google writes. “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 has 7 desktop plug-ins that provide a wide range of photo editing features, including mimicking the look of old cameras and films, retouching and correcting photos, darkroom retouching, adjusting color and tonality, HDR, image sharpening, and noise reduction.

The entire collection is free to download starting today, March 24th, 2016. If you spent money buying the collection anytime this year, you’ll get a full refund of your purchase price (it’ll be automatically issued soon).

“We’re excited to bring the powerful photo editing tools once only used by professionals to even more people now,” Google says. You can download the suite for yourself for both Windows and Mac here.