I was surprised to see this article about the MG Midget. I had a 9162 model when it was first introduced. It was actually my father's car, but I was the only one who drive it. I discovered BMC's performance options and added everything I could to the 948cc engine. That was a very fast Midget, revving freely to about 8000 RPM. I once beat out a Porsche on the NYS Thruway. Of course, back in the early 1960s, Porsches didn't go 180 MPH. My Midget could do almost 110. Years later, my wife got a used, green '69 Midget.

I eventually sold the Midget and got a 1965 Ford Galaxy with the 427 cu in engine and two 4-bbl Holleys. One extreme to the other.

http://jalopnik.com/the-mg-midget-is-so-tiny-it-makes-a-miata-feel-like-a-s-1773412908

The nik collection doesn't work with Lightroom Photoshop or Elements it works with Jpegs , PNG's and Tiff files.
A very fundamental thing in computing is to be able to pipe data from one program to another.

Lightroom works differently with nik than photoshop or other layer based editors do.

Lightroom creates a duplicate of an image which is passed to nik operated on and then saved. It is a destructive process as far as that copy goes there is no way to revert that copy back to how it was before the nik filter was applied (of course you still have the original since lightroom created a copy). If you feed Nik directly with an image, unless you have made a copy, you will overwrite the original.

With a layer based editor a copy is made of the image and processed by nik and then stacked on top of the original. There are a whole bunch of different layer blending modes that can affect the interaction between layers and also transparency plus there are layer masks.

Lets work an example of something you might want to do say a red london bus in a black & white photo.

Silver efex is a good tool for making a black & white conversion. There are 38 presets a bunch of colored filters a lot of different film type simulations and local adjustments to adjust brightness contrast structure and more. to be fair lightroom has some of these and so does photoshop but not all.

In lightroom you choose to edit in nik and do your black & white conversion and it does a wonderful job but now you want to make the bus red. But here we have a problem we have a color copy and a black and white copy but lightroom doesn't have tools to work with both copies as a layered image. Lightroom does understand a psd document and how to display it, even how to create one, but adobe left out the tools to work with the layers. They have a great layer based editor called Photoshop they want you to use for that.

I think Lightroom can create a stack a file with 2 or more images as layers that can be edited in a layer based editor but you can do this manually as well exporting the 2 images and creating a new layer on the base image and pasting the second image on the new layer.

So how about we do it differently instead of opening a copy in nik open it in photoshop/ affinity photo/ Gimp / Elements ... from lightroom and then call nik from one of those programs now we get an image with 2 layers a color base layer and a black & white layer you can add a layer mask to the black & white layer and paint on the layer mask where the bus is making the black & white image transparent so the color bus shows through.

I hope that illustrates how using nik via photoshop can be more creatively applied than in lightroom.

The nik collection works in OSX from 10.7 to current 10.11 and also in Windows from at least 7 to 10. It is possible that later versions of these operating systems may not allow nik to run eventually but there is no sign of that yet. The Nik collection tools do a certain range of tasks they do them well, do they need updating?

By now, most will have heard that the Google NIK Suite is now free, and that those who purchased it in 2016 will be getting a refund. Am I the only one with any concerns about this? I definitely have mixed feelings about it:

1) For those who didn't already have the suite, or recently purchased, it's a great thing, without question.
2) After having used it for over 3 years, I don't feel entitled to a refund, anyway.
3) There'll be a lot more users, so there'll be potentially more resources to learn the more advanced aspects of the product.
4) Although Google has been slipstreaming bugfixes automatically to users, they haven't provided any advertised new features since Analog Efex about 3 years ago. What's their motivation to continue to develop for it now?
5) Is Google going to discontinue support for the product now that it gets no revenue?
6) Where dos that leave the likes of Topaz and OnOne? It's real hard to compete with free.