DxO Nik Collection 9: What the New AI Masking and Color Grading Actually Deliver
PhotographyDxO’s Nik Collection 9 arrives as the most substantial update in the suite’s history — AI depth masking, a color grading wheel, and new creative filters land across all eight plugins in a single purchase.
How Version 9 Changes the Suite
Nik Collection has long occupied a specific niche: specialized post-processing that Lightroom and Photoshop don’t replicate. Eight plugins cover the full range from noise reduction (Dfine) to film simulation (Analog Efex) to black-and-white conversion (Silver Efex), each with workflow integration into Lightroom, Photoshop, and Affinity via a dropdown menu. The challenge has always been the learning curve — eight separate applications, each with its own interface logic.
Version 9 doesn’t collapse that complexity, but it changes the capability ceiling with three additions: AI-powered depth masking, subject selection, and a color grading wheel built directly into the plugins. These are offline-processing AI tools — no cloud upload, no subscription to an external model. The SLR Lounge review calls depth masking “one of the most powerful and impressive tools” in the update.
What the New AI Tools Actually Do
Depth masking segments an image by spatial depth rather than by color or luminance. For a landscape with a foreground subject, depth masking creates independent masks for near/middle/far zones without manual selection work. The practical application is selective editing that would previously require careful hand-masking in Photoshop.
Subject selection operates by hover — moving the cursor over an element generates a mask for that object. Combined with depth masking, this brings Nik Collection into closer functional alignment with Lightroom’s AI Masking feature, which has driven meaningful Lightroom retention among photographers who previously saw the app as thin on non-destructive local editing.
Color grading arrives as a dedicated wheel interface with separate hue, saturation, and luminance controls across highlights, midtones, and shadows. This closes the gap between Nik Collection’s color tools and what DaVinci Resolve-style color wheels offer. Stack Archive’s earlier DaVinci Resolve 21 coverage covered how grading tools are pulling photographers away from Adobe’s orbit — the Nik Collection 9 color wheel is a direct response to that migration pressure.
The suite also adds three creative filter effects in version 9: Chromatic Shift, Halation, and Glass Effects — analog-inspired treatments for photographers who use Analog Efex for the film simulation workflow.
The Limitations Worth Knowing
The suite sells as a complete package — individual plugins are not available separately. Photographers who only need, say, Silver Efex and Color Efex pay the full price. The AI tools in version 9 require working in TIFF or JPEG rather than raw files, which introduces an extra conversion step for raw-first workflows, though a non-destructive export option exists.
The reviewer flags one operational constraint: preview generation for AI-generated masks runs slowly on older hardware. Photographers on machines from 2019 or earlier should test before purchasing, as the trial runs 30 days and covers the full feature set.
Pricing: $179.99 for a new license, $99.99 for the upgrade from version 7 or 8. The license covers up to three computers with a lifetime activation — no annual subscription.
The So What
Nik Collection 9 is the update that makes the suite competitive with Lightroom’s AI masking and begins to address the color grading gap that kept photographers tethered to external tools. For photographers who already use Nik Collection, the $99 upgrade is justified by depth masking alone. For photographers evaluating it as a Lightroom supplement — rather than a replacement — the 30-day trial is the right starting point. The complete-suite pricing model remains a friction point for those who only need one or two plugins, but the quality of the new AI tools is high enough that the full suite is a harder sell to refuse than it was at version 8.
Photo by Egor Komarov on Pexels
Source: SLR Lounge
Content created with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy.
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