Google has a habit of acquiring software, cherry-picking features it deems worthy, and then letting the rest wither away into the digital either.  Acquisitions as a whole survive the merger, with Youtube and Android being among the few to flourish. When the search engine giant purchased Nik Software in 2012, it was only a matter of time before the powerful editing suite would be left to rot.

After five short years, Google announced that they had no future plans to develop the Nik Collection. Good news came shortly after that when the remaining Nik assets (sans Snapseed) were now under control of DXO.

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As the new management DXO quickly integrated the U Point technology found within the Nik software suite within their new DxO PhotoLab (formerly DxO OpticsPro). Recently the company announced via Google+ that it would continue to develop with Google:

“Dear Nik Collection users,
We at DxO are very pleased to welcome the Nik community!
Like you, we are passionate about photography and image quality. That’s why we view this opportunity with Nik as a commitment to ensure that you — that all of us who enjoy taking photos — are guaranteed to have the very best solutions at our disposal.
You’ll be happy to know that our developers are enthusiastically working on a new version of the Nik Collection to be released in 2018!”

As more photographers leave Adobe branded software in exodus, the Nik Collection has become very popular among those who use  Affinity Photo. The development by DXO with hopefully bring a much need breath of fresh air to the collection with better integration for these programs.

The update to the Nik collection is expected to drop mid-2018. You can sign up to be notified directly from DXO, here.