It took away Snapseed as well as the popular Nik Collection of plug-ins and began to give away Snapseed for free. So, Google simply bought up Nik Inc… lock stock and barrel. In fact, Snapseed was so good that Google saw the little app as a way of getting a foothold in the image market and thought it would attract phone users to Google’s image storage platform.
It was a fabulous app for use on iOS devices and in some ways, it did away with the need for many photographers to even have an image editor like Adobe Photoshop. Then the company produced an image editor that it called Snapseed. More plug-ins for Photoshop, Lightroom – and even Apple’s excellent but now defunct Aperture program – came along. The company’s first product was a digital filter called Define, that did an amazing job of cleaning up the digital noise that was so common with files from early digital cameras when shot at higher ISO sensitivities. The company in question was called Nik… nothing to do with Nikon, just a happy coincidence.
