Nik Collection 9.0 — Mac version

It runs on any Mac with macOS 13.3 or newer, Intel or Apple Silicon, inside Photoshop, Affinity or DxO PhotoLab.

Host apps — where the plugins appear: Photoshop, Affinity Photo, DxO PhotoLab. You launch a tool from the Filter menu and it opens its own window over your image.

Plugins in the suite — the eight tools you get: Analog Efex Pro (old-film looks), Color Efex Pro (52 filters, 250 effects and a new Color Grading tool), Dfine (noise reduction), HDR Efex Pro (tone merging), Sharpener Pro (output sharpening with a live preview area), Silver Efex Pro (black-and-white conversions), Viveza (U Point local adjustments), Perspective Efex (geometry fixes).

U Point — the control-point system for local edits. Drop a point, adjust a radius, tweak brightness or contrast just there. Version 9 lets you copy and paste those adjustments between images.

Masking — Depth Masks and AI Masks are new. They isolate subjects or background without manual painting. Mask Overlays show you the mask as you work, and Preset Hover Preview flips through looks before you commit.

Sound — the tools feel like a darkroom extension. Silver Efex Pro gives grain and tone curves that respond like film. Analog Efex Pro adds Chromatic Shift, Glass Effect and Halation in the latest build—subtle optical faults that stop a shot looking sterile.

What a wedding photographer told me

A mate who shoots 40 weddings a year sat with version 9 after a Saturday job. She had 800 raw files from a single day — golden-hour portraits, dark dance-floor snaps, a few backlit group shots where faces were underexposed.

She pulled the dark group shot into Photoshop, opened Viveza, dropped four control points on faces and lifted the shadows without touching the sky. Then she copied those points to ten other frames from the same spot. What was a half-hour job took six minutes. Silver Efex Pro handled the dance-floor shots — she ran the "Push Process N+1" preset, dialled back the grain a notch, and had a set of reportage frames that looked like Tri-X pushed two stops. She did not open Lightroom's sliders once.

Three-second plugin launches on an M1 MacBook Air

On an M1 MacBook Air with 16 GB of RAM, Nik Collection 9 loads each plugin in about three seconds from Photoshop. Once open, sliders and control points feel immediate — no beachball, no lag when scrubbing through presets. Depth Masks take an extra second to compute on a 45-megapixel file, but the overlay appears cleanly and you can refine the mask with a couple of clicks.

Memory use sits around 400–600 MB per plugin window. If you stack three tools in a session — say, Dfine into Color Efex Pro into Sharpener Pro — Photoshop's memory pressure rises but the system stays responsive. On an older Intel iMac with 8 GB, close other apps first; the plugins themselves run fine, but Photoshop and Nik together will lean on swap. Crash-wise, I have not seen one in two weeks of regular use across Affinity Photo and Photoshop.

Stability note: if you switch host apps quickly — edit in Affinity, then jump to Photoshop — give the plugin five seconds to release before opening the next host. Most hiccups come from the host, not from Nik.

First few days: three things worth doing early

1. Learn the U Point copy-paste rhythm. On day one, pick a shoot with 20 similar frames. Adjust one image with Viveza or Color Efex Pro, copy the control points, paste them onto the rest. It teaches you how far a single point setup stretches before needing a tweak.
2. Hover before you click. Preset Hover Preview is new and easy to miss. In Silver Efex Pro or Analog Efex Pro, hover over preset names for a live preview on your image. It saves you clicking through fifteen film stocks to find the right one.
3. Build a personal preset pack. After a week of editing, save the three looks you reach for most. A custom grain-and-curve in Silver Efex Pro, a lifted-blacks colour grade in Color Efex Pro, and a specific Chromatic Shift setting in Analog Efex Pro. They become your starting point, not the defaults.

One practical tip: if you grabbed Nik Collection 9 Mac torrent or a Nik Collection torrent build, check the included read-me for host linking steps. Sometimes the plugins need a manual point to the Photoshop plugins folder before they appear in the Filter menu. Takes a minute to sort.

• Depth Masks and AI Masks for automatic subject isolation
• Color Grading tool inside Nik Color Efex
• Chromatic Shift, Glass Effect and Halation effects
• Preset Hover Preview and Mask Overlays
• Copy and paste local adjustments between images

• macOS 13.3 or newer
• Intel or Apple Silicon Mac
• Photoshop, Affinity Photo or DxO PhotoLab (host application)