DxO acquires Nik Collection assets from Google | Hacker News Reader

DxO acquires Nik Collection assets from Google

nikcollection.dxo.com

89 pointspetepete37 comments

This is fantastic!

The Nik Collection can do some amazing things (and is worth spending some time with if you haven't already). Their contrast and polarizer tools are particularly good, as well as their B/W workflow.

From what I was told by a former Googler, they acquired Nik for the team, but didn't really have a use for the tools they created - they were mostly interested in the skills for Google Photos. At least Google found a way to pass the software on to another owner that will likely keep developing these tools, although it took a couple of years for that to happen.

PS - RAW editing tools seem to all have their own strengths and weaknesses. In my experience, Lightroom is the easiest to use (and gives good results overall), but Capture One (by Phase One) has much better color management. Skin tones just look 'right' with the default flow, and it's free (lite version) / discounted for Sony cameras. Canon's Digital Photo Professional is free (for supported cameras) and rather clunky, but it can produce very sharp results with some 'soft' lenses, like the 16-36mm f/2.8 II.

If you have a photo you really like and have some time to get the most out of it, you could produce a TIFF via Digital Photo Professional (assuming you have a Canon), then process with Lightroom/Capture One for basic settings, and finally adjust to your liking with Nik Collection.

As a tech M&A guy, I'm actually surprised Google doesn't sell off more of it's corporate assets that it no longer wants to pursue. I suspect as revenues/profits start to normalize (i.e. don't grow at exponential rates), the street will put more pressure on them to do so.

The vast majority of what google has grown in the "moat" and the "scorched land" that surrounds "the castle" of search and paid clicks is at best useless and often toxic. And then there is YouTube.

Edit: when useless, it is useless to a buyer, but not to a user. When toxic, it is toxic to both.

> useless to a buyer

To the potential buyer of the asset or a client buying a Google service?

Good example, non-Google related - Pinboard buying Delicious.

Excellent example.

Can a one-man-show benefit from the disposal of a Google owned asset? Most likely.

Parent was talking "tech M&A", "corporate assets" and "the street". Not same.

I was the OP btw :)

I'd have to dig further but I have to imagine there are products that are created by Google that don't reach $100M+ in revenue that Google eventually folds. Something more likely - a product that is $10M in revenue that plateaus and could be sold off as an asset.

I honestly don't know, just throwing it out there.

Google doesn't operate that way.

Almost everything that comes out is a loss leader in one way or another (and more often than not, in one way and another).

You can dig, but it will most likely be extremely hard to find a stand alone product/service that plateaued at such a revenue level.

Wishing that such a product would be "created by Google" puts the bar way way too high.

The Nik Collection, for example, arrived via acquisition...

Care to provide some examples?

Having a bunch of happy users doesn't seem like a bad starting point for a business to me.

The Nik Collection is one of the few offline products of Google, which also doesn't require any server infrastructure (AFAIK, I never used it).

Most other Google products mostly live server-side, entangled with proprietary internal services and frameworks. So before selling them off, they would have to do extensive rewrites of the codebases, which might not even be possible with public tech, and also eat into one of their scarcest resources (developer time). I can understand why they'd rather kill off their services.

>Most other Google products mostly live server-side, entangled with proprietary internal services and frameworks.

Android is the world's most popular OS and can be used without Google Play Services as the billion plus devices it runs on can attest to. And then there's Chromium, the open source version of the world's most popular browser. I don't recall these products needing to live server side nor be entangled with proprietary internal services or frameworks. Additionally, there are probably no other projects that have had as much code taken freely and reused by other companies and people than these 2 open source products.

Yes, that reasoning doesn't apply to all their products, but both Android and Chrome have a big business value for Google, as they are web clients, and allow Google to shape the web in a significant way. Especially with being in control of both a major website and a browser on desktop & mobile they can push for technologies that serve their websites needs like AMP, SPDY, QUIC, etc. like a Facebook never could.

What is the nix collection?

Collection of image processing plugins for color manipulation, film simulation, sharpening, noise reduction, ... Highly regarded and expensive before Google bought them

https://www.google.com/nikcollection/

Apparently a collection of plugins for Adobe Lightroom.

The tools can all be used standalone as well as directly from LR, Capture One and other processing/image editing software.

Before Google made them free they weren't cheap, $500 for the collection.

It's a set of tools for photographers.

Google's photo strategy is so strange.

Photos is a great app and has universal appeal - powerful, intuitive editing, easy and smart search, free backup, etc.

Snapseed is also one of the best mobile photo editing tools around, certainly the best free one IMHO.

My guess is they used the Nik technology in these tools to make the editing and retouching functions work so well, and now they sold it with contingent that they can use it in perpetuity...

Here is the weird part -why wouldn't Google merge Snapseed editing with Photos? It would be a killer combination and dominate the consumer space, locking in users to the Goole platform. Isn't that ultimately what they want?.

I always assumed Snapseed and Photos would merge one day. Yet, it has never come, and instead Google is empowering others in the space with their tech.

Maybe they have "good enough" dominance in the area and don't care anymore? Maybe all they care about is tying users into the Drive platform and Photos is just another funnel that did good enough and can be ignored?

Why would they have to be merged? What would we, most of the users, gain by having a huge bloated gallery app dragging a whole editing software with it? Is installing that other app really such a completely exausting impossible endeavor?

What's wrong with tools that do their core feature very well and can share data between them?

They dont share data well. I cannot select "Edit with SnapSeed" and have it roll back into google photos without getting a second copy of my picture. Would love to see that kind of integration - but they dont even have that.

I also don't get the need to add additional bloat to an app just to add editing features a very small percentage will ever use. Unfortunately, the number of apps I use that are over 100MB seem to be increasing rather than decreasing.

Well, Google levelled up their game on Snapseed at some point, so why milk the cow you don't know how to feed, makes sense.

The surprising thing here is that Google let DxO have it. I was expecting them to let the cow starve to death because they got bored with it.

Well they did sell Sketchup to Trimble when they got bored with that.

Seems like Google and DxO work well together...

This is good news. As a professional photographer there at least 2-3 filters in the Nik Collection I could not find somewhere else. I was worried Nik will disappear (I still bought them expensive in former days).

Is there a CEO who is able to make an announcement without claiming they revolutionized something?

Such an announcement would be really disruptive!

"The FileSearchEX product has greatly improved the search experience when using Windows 10. Others say it has revolutionized their time spent looking for files and folders."

Not sure how to read the headline versus the content - my take is that the current version will remain free but the new version will not (so I don't see that there's much change there, given that probably everyone who wanted it has it already and it's widely available elsewhere?)

"The current version will remain available for free on DxO’s dedicated website , while a new versionis planned for mid-2018"

[1] - https://nikcollection.dxo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Nik...

Ok, we changed the submission title from "DxO acquires Nik Collection from Google, will be maintained and remain free" back to the boring corporate (but at least not misleading) thing. That's more consistent with HN's title rule (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

Last released Google version does not work on macOS Sierra (tried and failed). If they fix nothing else but support for all recent versions it will be a step forward.

Hmm, works for me. How does it fail?

As far as I can see it’s not supported beyond Adobe CC 2015. Tried to apply a filter in Photoshop 2017 and it unexpectedly quit.

Really glad that Nik is being maintained again. While I was happy that Google released it for free, it was essentially abandonware.

I don't have a Mac and don't know if you've tried this, but you might still be able to run the standalone programs directly from the installation directory for making atomic edits to photos, then import those as new layers into your project. It isn't as good as using them as plugins, which lets you readjust settings on-the-fly, but it has worked for me as a hobbyist.

I just downloaded the latest version in case they take it down at some point. Appeared to work fine in Sierra with latest Photoshop CC. Also displays in retina, which I’m pretty sure it didn’t when I tried it when they first made it free, so I guess there has been an update.

Have to wonder if this has anything to do with DxO rating the Pixel 2 as the "phone camera with the best image quality".

Do you think all of the reviewers gushing over the Pixel 2 camera are also in on it?

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