I bought the all-in-one bundle about five years ago and have never needed to use any other software, apart from for stitching panoramas or stacking. The PL + FP bundle currently costs €257,99 and, if you also want to do perspective corrections, the PL + FP + VP bundle is €288,99, which is a discount of 34% on buying the three products individually. You can create multiple virtual copies, which allow you to try out different effects and each virtual copy only adds a few KB to the DOP sidecar files instead of having to create yet another multi-megabyte TIFF file.

You retain the ability to go back to RAW adjustments at any time and only need to create TIFF or JPEG files when you finally want to export the image for either web use or, possibly printing. Yes, it costs more, but what it gives you is a single app for a start to finish workflow without having to generate or work with TIFF or JPEG files. On the other hand, if you were to buy one of the PhotoLab bundles, you wouldn’t need to use Nik Collection because most everything you would use Nik Collection for is included in the PL/FP/VP bundle.

This means that, for every RAW file, you will have to create a TIFF file, which is usually larger than the RAW file and will take up more disk space and crowd your folders with up to four files (RAW, TIFF, DOP sidecar and XMP sidecar) for each image If you need to go back to any of the RAW adjustments, you would have to scrap the TIFF and start again. The free version of PhotoLab that you get is the “Essential” version, which contains a lot less than the Elite version.īear in mind that Nik Collection is primarily designed as a series of plug-ins for other software that does the RAW conversion and then works with a resulting TIFF or JPEG file, so you are going to have to start by converting your images to TIFF or JPEG in PL5 Essential, then export them to whatever Nik tool you need to use, possibly returning the TIFF/JPEG to PhotoLab for any further work.

Dxo photolab elite vs essentials