Nik Collection 9 reviews: what they don’t tell you

Key points

• Most Nik Collection 9 reviews are written by people with a financial stake in your decision to buy. That’s true of many (most?) photography software reviews.
• Pre-release access and affiliate commissions shape what gets written, and what doesn’t.
• The one question reviews often skip: is this upgrade actually worth the money?
• Forum threads from existing owners can be much more useful than any review on the first page of Google.

The search that started this post: “Nik Collection 9 review”

Before buying any piece of software, most photographers do the obvious thing: they search for reviews. So when Nik Collection 9 arrived, that’s what I did.

I searched for “Nik Collection 9 review”. What came back was a wall of enthusiasm. Every result on the first page was positive. Several had borrowed language straight from DxO’s own announcement. Most featured affiliate links or an “exclusive” discount code. A few were written from pre-release access that DxO had handed out before launch.

So I kept looking. I wanted a review that did three things: stated a standard before measuring the software against it, asked plainly whether the upgrade was worth the money, and was willing to reach a conclusion DxO’s marketing team wouldn’t have signed off on.

I found only one. That absence is what this post is about.

This isn’t a review of Nik Collection 9. It’s an explanation of why an actual review of it is so hard to find. And what that means if you’re trying to make a buying decision.

The software may be excellent, fine, or overpriced for what you personally need. The problem is that the current review landscape can’t tell you which.

This post shows you the evidence and hands you the tools to work it out for yourself.

The marketing playbook: “biggest update ever”

Knowing how to evaluate claims like “biggest ever” teaches you something you can use on every product you buy.

DxO’s April 2026 announcement declared version 9 the biggest update in the history of its creative photo editing suite. The announcement headline calls it the “biggest update ever”.

This wasn’t the first time they released the “biggest update ever”. Two years earlier, in May 2024, DxO had already told us that Nik Collection 7 was its biggest ever.

“Biggest ever” is a claim about cumulative size, so if each release genuinely adds more than the last – even only a little – then v7 could have been the biggest-so-far in 2024 and v9 the biggest-so-far in 2026. Fair enough. But notice what’s happened. By asking “is that true?”, you’ve already been pulled onto the wrong question. The phrase’s problem isn’t that it’s false. It’s that it’s useless to you, and it’s useless in three specific ways worth learning to spot.

It doesn’t inform you

A claim that applies to nearly every release carries no information about whether this release matters to you. If “biggest ever” is the expected default every couple of years, it isn’t news; it’s just obvious. The phrase has zero power to discriminate between a must-have upgrade and one you can safely skip, which is the only question you actually want answered.

Here’s the detail that gives the game away. Nik Collection 8, in 2025, wasn’t sold as the biggest anything. DxO called it a “major upgrade” and headlined specific features: a re-engineered Photoshop panel, new layer management, masking, and Silver Efex improvements. Yet DxO hung that biggest-ever banner on v7 and v9 but not v8. Why?

Because when they had genuinely new features to announce, they led with those instead. “Biggest ever” is what marketing people reach for when they need to generate excitement but don’t have much to work with. It’s a spotlight the company aims wherever it likes, not a measurement of anything.

So with substance-less claims like “bigger! better!”, ask yourself: does that matter? If the answer is no, it’s decoration, not information.

“Biggest” measures their effort, not your benefit

Even if Nik Collection 9 really is the largest release in the suite’s history, by feature count or lines of code or sheer engineering hours … so what? “Biggest” is a measure of how much work DxO did, not how much value you get.

A release can be the largest in a product’s history and still be completely irrelevant to your needs. If the headline additions are AI masking and depth masks you’ll never touch, then “biggest update ever” is true and worthless at the same time. The superlative quietly swaps the vendor’s metric (volume of change) for the one that matters to you (value of that change to you), and hopes you won’t notice the substitution. Seeing that swap is half the work of spotting the difference between a reviewer’s candid opinion and recycled marketing.

None of this is unique to DxO. It’s ordinary software salesmanship. But knowing it’s happening hands you a filter you can use before reading a review. Any “review” that repeats “biggest update ever” is echoing the marketing, not testing it — and you can skip straight past it. As we’re about to see, that one move clears most of the Nik Collection 9 reviews off the page.

The echo chamber

Watch what happened to that “biggest update ever” line once DxO released it into the wild.

DxO called version 7 the biggest update ever, and PetaPixel’s headline announced that Nik Collection 7 offered the biggest update ever.

For v9, Digital Camera World made it the headline, in quotation marks, as though to distance DCW’s editorial voice from DxO’s sales pitch.

The article that follows is a feature walk-through drawn entirely from DxO’s materials, with every image supplied by DxO. It closes with the phrase “That’s not all”, a line lifted straight from late-night infomercial copy.

The quotes in the headline are a fig leaf. The piece underneath them is a sales pitch.

Marketing language doesn’t merely influence these pieces. In places it becomes them, reproduced with minimal change and presented as independent assessment.

That pattern — vendor language reproduced as editorial — runs deeper than lazy headline writing. It’s structural.

The review ecosystem: how it actually works

What “affiliate” means, and why it matters

If you’ve never come across the term, here’s the short version. When a review site includes a link to buy the product, the site usually earns a small commission whenever someone clicks through and purchases. Sometimes there’s also a discount code, which does the same job. This is legal, it’s normally disclosed somewhere on the page, and it’s extremely common. Many photography sites run on it.

That doesn’t mean the reviewer is dishonest. A reviewer can take a commission and still stand behind every word. But it creates a pull that only ever points one way: toward buy, never toward wait or skip this one. A glowing review earns the site money. A “don’t bother upgrading” review earns the author nothing. That incentive shapes what gets written, and how.

One thing to watch for is the claim that a reviewer’s discount code is “exclusive”. Since multiple reviewers claim to offer an exclusive discount code, that doesn’t mean no one else does too. Instead, “exclusive” simply means the code is specific to that reviewer. It helps DxO track who is sending them business and pay commissions accurately. Any time you see the word “exclusive”, question what that really means and why a reviewer would use it, because it’s a marketing ploy trying to make their authority seem unique.

The pre-release problem

More than one v9 review was based on pre-release beta access from DxO rather than a normal purchase. Life After Photoshop published before the software was even publicly available, calling it one of the biggest and best updates yet before a real review on published software was possible. Thomas Fitzgerald explicitly states he “had access to the beta version for a few days”, but calls the result a review. A few days with pre-release software isn’t a review. It’s a first impression.

This matters for a practical reason: pieces published first often rank highest in search. So the reviews most people actually read are, structurally, the least independent ones.

Can you trust these Nik Collection 9 reviews? Six, examined

Let’s look at who reviewed Nik Collection 9, sampled from the first page of Google reviews. (Your search results for “nik collection 9 review” will almost certainly be different.)

Across the first page of results, only one credible evaluation surfaced. Only one stated clearly they have no ulterior motives. Only one reached a conclusion that diverged meaningfully from DxO’s marketing.

We’ll leave that best one for last. First, examining the others helps pinpoint telltale signs of unreliability.

Life After Photoshop

Right at the top of the review, the TL;DR lists pros and cons with a clear 2.5 out of 5 (“meh”) rating for value.

Even so, the first line of summary text includes highly emotional marketing words: “deep”, “powerful”, “inspirational”, and an echo of “biggest ever” (“most comprehensive yet”). The list of pros includes hype words like “the stars”, “huge range”, “varied and inspiring”. The cons list is mostly inconsequential, except for expense. So there is at least a bit of analysis here, which is helpful.

The website notes that it uses affiliate links to generate commissions, and it was given early access, pre-release, which suggests favourable treatment by DxO. It includes a sidebar with a discount code.

Thomas Fitzgerald Photography

Right from the top, the review discloses its intent with a snazzy image listing headline features, and a jazzy layout and font choices.

That design choice encourages you to keep reading, which is what every author wants. But starting an ostensibly serious review with this type of image that pushes the actual content of the review below the screen suggests that the reviewer’s motivation is to entice the reader to get excited about the product. That’s the motivation of the DxO marketing team, not necessarily an unbiased reviewer seeking engagement.

At the bottom of the page, the review mentions that Fitzgerald participates in the DxO affiliate program.

The review includes some gentle caveats and questions about some of DxO’s choices. But it ends with an unambiguous call to action: buy the upgrade.

Notice the inclusion of “bigger”, echoing the “biggest ever” marketing mantra.

The gripes he mentions are innocuous ones, such as about performance (to be expected since he was using a beta version), selection editing, and where certain tools appear in the different Nik modules. He also mentions that the AI masking can make mistakes, which he acknowledges is to be expected with any AI masking tool. Those are enhancement requests, not critical limitations: the kind of safe, inconsequential observations that signal objectivity without risking his relationship with DxO.

His complaint that the Halation filter belongs in Analog Efex rather than Color Efex is the tell. It’s a minor placement quibble that he devotes space to while leaving the actual evaluative questions entirely unasked: How does it compare to competitors? Does it work as advertised? That’s not balanced reviewing. It’s the appearance of it.

Vanessa Joy’s YouTube video

This is straight up an infomercial. She signals this early by disclosing that the video is sponsored by DxO:

“I’ll be really honest with you, admittedly, I make sponsored videos.”

That’s fine, but it’s one thing for a company to give or loan a product to a reviewer and ask them to give their honest opinion. It’s quite another for a company to pay the reviewer to make a video.

Notice that the YouTube video’s description starts with a discount code, and features over-the-top promotional language inappropriate for a review:

Her narration includes no analysis whatever. Instead, it hypes the product with statements like:

“‘…every time they send me their updates, something new that they’re working on, I always think like, ‘Oh yeah, I know what Nik does.’ And then they just blow it out of the water.”

She gets preferential treatment (she doesn’t have to buy the product, DxO gifts it to her, and then pays her to say nice things), and exaggerates with “blow it out of the water”.

The love-bombing is relentless:

“I love their colour effects…”

“I’ve loved putting them over photos…”

“…pour my heart into it…”

“…I just love having that ability to dive in deep with … all of the updates that they’ve done to it to make it all that more part of my creative process.”

“… editing photos in this DxO Collection, every time, hands down, has always been such a creative, artistic, and unique experience.”

Gushing about how editing in the Nik Collection “has always been such a creative, artistic, and unique experience” doesn’t qualify as an objective analysis that helps you decide if the product deserves your attention. Worse, it suggests the false hope that every time you use the collection, you’ll have a creative, artistic, and unique experience.

And pay attention to the framing:

Pristine office, clothes colour-coordinated with the furniture and accent wall, camera decoratively posed in the background, dog on her lap. It’s all carefully constructed credibility signalling, with every visual element chosen to convey the impression of taste, success, and relatability. Personal charm and physical presentation are essential to the pitch. The viewer is being sold to before the product is even mentioned. There’s no analysis, just the sale.

Marcus Lashah Walker

The title of the video is an immediate red flag: “Why Every Photographer Needs This”. That’s obviously not true. No single piece of software is essential for every photographer.

And take a look at that poster image for the video. The supposed before — “INITIAL PROCESSED TIFF” — is almost completely desaturated with no background. The after is fully saturated colour credited to “NEW AI MASKS!” and ”DEPTH MASKS!”. Nik Collection 9 may do a lot of things, but transforming sepia to Technicolor isn’t in the feature list.

His opening narration describes “groundbreaking AI-driven masking” and “pixel-precise control”. Those aren’t his words. It’s language lifted directly from DxO’s own marketing, a press release with a YouTube narrator’s voice on them.

He follows up with narration like “This version introduces groundbreaking AI-driven masking and high-end analog-inspired filters for pixel-precise control and authentic creative effects.” Adding AI masking doesn’t break new ground when competing tools have offered it for years. Filters aren’t pixel-precise. Using filters is fine and fun, but it’s not authentic.

The demonstrations that follow don’t support either claim. The AI masking he shows on screen isn’t groundbreaking nor pixel-precise. Every adjustment is broad and regional. At one point he stumbles onto a product limitation: “as of right now, you don’t have the ability to add your own starting points.” A genuine reviewer would flag that as a caveat and follow it up. Walker mentions it once and moves on. That’s the closest the video gets to critical analysis.

PetaPixel: the sponsored article coded to look independent

Not every piece of sponsored content surfaces when you search “Nik Collection 9 review.” Search “Nik Collection 9” without the word review, and the results look different. You might find a link from a publication you trust for independent photography coverage. Look closer before you read. The disclosure is there if you know where to look. But what the article tells its readers and what it tells Google are two different stories.

Before looking at that difference, first let’s review this “review”.

Right at the beginning of the article “8 Editing Problems Nik Collection 9 Actually Solves”, it states “Full disclosure: This article was brought to you by DxO.”

That’s a coy way of saying it’s an advertisement. “Brought to you by” is an advertising disclosure phrase borrowed from broadcast media. It’s unambiguous to a human reader that DxO paid for the content.

The entire article reads like promotional copy: feature lists, claims of groundbreaking new technology, not a single critical question asked.

The opening salvo sets the tone:

“A major update to one of photography’s oldest plug-in suites broke that pattern by taking the editing problems most photographers have accepted as unavoidable and building tools that solve them.”

Read it quickly (the way most people read online) and it says: Nik Collection 9 solves problems that couldn’t be solved before. But read it carefully and it says something much weaker: that some photographers didn’t know solutions already existed. That single word, “most,” is doing a lot of work. It’s the escape hatch from a false advertising claim, inserted precisely because it will slip past a skimming reader unnoticed.

The target audience for that sleight of hand is beginners and amateurs who haven’t yet learned that AI masking, depth masking, colour grading, and blending modes exist in competing software — some or all of them in tools they may already own: Photoshop, Lightroom, ON1, Capture One, Affinity, and even free software like ART, a no-affiliate alternative I use myself. Experienced photographers will read that sentence, pause, and think: wait, none of this is new. But experienced photographers aren’t the ones being sold to.

The user benefits in the article come from a single source: Cyril Duchene, product marketing manager at DxO.

Not a photographer who tested the software. Not an independent reviewer. Just the person whose job is to sell it. The article is structured as a series of feature descriptions, each anchored by a Duchene quote. That’s not journalism. It’s a vendor Q&A formatted to look like editorial.

A proper review of editing software asks certain questions as a matter of course: Does it work as advertised? How does it compare to alternatives? What does it cost to upgrade from the previous version? What are its limitations? This article asks none of them. There’s no independent testing, no competitor comparison, no pricing, no caveats, no acknowledgment that any of these features exist elsewhere. What remains after you strip away the Duchene quotes is a feature list with cinematic references (Blade Runner, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) in place of evidence.

Let’s go a little deeper and see how they trick Google into thinking this advertisement is a review.

There’s a technical dimension to this that goes beyond sloppy editorial standards. PetaPixel displays a sponsored (“brought to you by”) label on the article. It’s visible to human readers, easy to miss, but there. What isn’t visible to readers is what the article’s code tells Google.

Google uses the “rel” attribute on HTML links to determine whether a link represents a genuine editorial endorsement. Its rules are unambiguous: links within paid content must carry rel=”sponsored”, which tells Google’s crawler the link exists because money changed hands, not because an editor chose to recommend it. The rel=”nofollow” attribute would do the same job. Either one instructs Google to discount the ranking boost that editorial links carry.

Every external link to DxO in this article carries rel=”follow external noopener”.

The “external” and “noopener” values are routine housekeeping. They have nothing to do with Google’s ranking systems. The operative word that impacts ranking is “follow”. It tells Google to treat the links as genuine editorial endorsements and award DxO the full ranking benefit. Neither “sponsored” nor “nofollow” appears anywhere.

Both are absent by choice. PetaPixel uses a plugin to manage how external links are tagged. Every DxO link in the article carries that plugin’s own fingerprint in the code. That same plugin explicitly supports rel=”sponsored” as a configurable option. PetaPixel had the tool to do the right thing and configured it not to.

PetaPixel is not a naive publisher. It implements structured data, uses professional SEO tooling, and understands exactly how these systems work. The gap between what the article tells readers and what its code tells Google is not an oversight. The correct analogy is a newspaper that prints “Advertisement” in tiny text at the bottom of a paid article while simultaneously instructing its distribution network to position it with the news.

PetaPixel describes itself on its own About page as “the world’s leading independent photography, videography, and imaging technology publication.”

Claiming independence does real work for them. It’s why readers trust their reviews, why their content ranks in search results, and why DxO is willing to pay for placement there. The value of their endorsement depends entirely on the perception of independence.

A publication can run sponsored content and remain independent. The test is whether the reader can tell the difference. PetaPixel passes that test with human readers: the “Sponsored” label is there, however easy it is to miss. It fails the test with Google, where the same content is coded to look like independent editorial content. That’s not a tension between commerce and journalism. It’s a deliberate technical choice to tell two different stories to two different audiences simultaneously.

Andy Hutchinson: a truly valuable Nik Collection 9 review

This video does what the others don’t: it evaluates the key strengths and weaknesses against the needs of its likely audience, giving you enough concrete detail to judge whether it suits you specifically.

Hutchinson states upfront that he isn’t supported by anyone except his wife, his Patreon supporters, and his Substack subscribers. He points out that he’s not in DxO’s affiliate program or indeed any affiliate scheme.

He doesn’t waste any time talking about how great Nik or DxO is. He refers you to his previous reviews of version 7 and 8, then jumps right in with version 9’s additions and improvements. Matter-of-fact demos of the highlights (masking, colour grading, blending modes) contrast with his frank opinion about other modules (“The rest of the updates are, it must be said, slim pickings”). Early on, he gives you a clear try/buy signal: “…unless you found localized edits in the Nik suite to be lacking, there’s far less to tempt anyone to update from version 8 and probably version 7 too.”

Is Nik Collection 9 worth upgrading? What owners actually say

Six pieces. One straightforward assessment. That ratio is the problem this post set out to document. And it’s why user forums are worth your time when the review landscape isn’t.

Forums can deliver important insights, with some caveats: threads can wander into side issues, get tangled in platform-specific complaints, or devolve into brand loyalty arguments. They often start with a simple, pointed observation from someone who owns the previous version and is asking the one question the reviews skip: is this worth my money? That opening question, and the early responses it draws, is usually where the useful reality checks live.

The DPReview thread is a good example. One user cuts straight to the point, posting DxO’s own feature summary and asking whether anyone else sees what they see: “The following summary from DxO reads like the changes are tiny and DxO has screwed over existing owners of 8 to grab cash calling the new minor update a full new version.” Another raises the upgrade cycle problem directly: “I bought Nik Collection v8 exactly 5 months ago, and now they want the full upgrade price of $100 again. Their upgrade cycles are nowhere published… It’s a very untransparent business model.” A third brings in the competition: “These days I also have ON1 Photo RAW and there doesn’t seem to be much if anything in Nik that can’t be accomplished in Photo RAW… The headline new features in Nik like AI selection, depth masks etc have been in ON1 for a while.”

The Talk Photography thread is shorter but consistent in tone. The thread opener, a user who has paid for every version since v5, says the AU$140 upgrade price is too high to justify: “I have been using NIK since Version 5 and have always paid, but no more.” One contributor is still running the original free Google release of Silver Efex and sees no reason to change. Another, who did receive a free upgrade from v8 to v9, observes that Silver Efex looks essentially unchanged between the two versions.

Not every forum voice is negative. On Nikon Cafe, one user takes a more measured view: “I think it looks like a very worthwhile upgrade for those who use these plugins. The AI-based depth mask looks really useful.” The same post draws an instructive comparison: “Video editing tools like DaVinci Resolve have that and it’s really powerful.” That’s a useful counterpoint, and it independently makes the same observation as the more critical voices, that depth masking isn’t a new idea. The disagreement is about whether Nik’s implementation is worth the upgrade price, not about whether the feature is novel.

These forum users are sharing their opinions, and they’re asking the right questions. Almost every review doesn’t answer them because they’re built to sell the upgrade, not to weigh it.

How to read any software review (and spot a sales pitch)

Apply these reality checks to any product, and skip any review that fails them before you waste your time.

• Check whether the headline is actually marketing. If a review’s headline or opening section echoes the product announcement, the review is doing the marketing department’s work.
• Check the disclosure first. Affiliate link, exclusive discount code, pre-release access? None disqualifies a review, but each is essential context. Read the piece differently knowing it’s there.
• Is it just a feature list? Does the review merely highlight the product’s features without meaningful analysis? If the review doesn’t include the author’s own testing and results, you can get the same information from the vendor’s website.
• Find the forums. Search “[product] worth upgrading” or “[product] [version] forum”. People who already own the last version and are deciding whether to upgrade are asking the right questions, and their answers cost you nothing.
• Note the timing. First-wave pre-release pieces rank highest and are least independent. A review written weeks later by someone who bought and lived with the software is worth more.
• Apply the superlative test. If “biggest update ever” also appeared in the previous version’s marketing, the phrase carries no information. Discount it entirely.

What you can do with all this

This post started with a simple search for a review of a piece of software. What I found instead was a case study in how a certain kind of reviewer operates and why they fail people trying to make a buying decision. The problem isn’t with reviews or reviewers, as such. Andy Hutchinson’s video proves that a critical, independent assessment is possible.

The reviewing and marketing collaboration that produces most of what poses as reviews — affiliate commissions, beta access, sponsored placements, SEO manipulation — targets your wallet. This post demonstrates it all works. Now you can see through the manipulations, and evaluate whether a review will help you or sneakily sell to you.