I have never upgraded to the new, no longer free Nik filters because I make very little use of them. However, I do rely on a few of the filters for a specialized sort of image. Today I found that Nik had disappeared from Photoshop with the most recent update, so I reinstalled it.
First hint that something was amiss: the installer didn't find either photoshop or Lightroom. I had to add them manually. It installed over the old (identical) version.
I then tried using Color Efex on an image in Photoshop. It seemed to work, but when I clicked OK, the image wasn't saved; Nik just disappeared, putting me back where I was.
I searched online and found a posting saying that the old version of Nik will not work with the newest version of Photoshop--the behavior described was exactly what I experienced--but that it still works with Lightroom. So, I opened a random image in Lightroom, and indeed, it worked.
I'm not one of those who moan and groan about having to pay for software. The people who write it deserve to be paid. However, I use only 2 filters from the entire set (Tonal Contrast and Pro Contrast), and those only rarely.
Does anyone know of a good description of what those two filters actually do? If I can figure that out, I'll just emulate the adjustments. I suppose I could also do the Nik adjustments at the end separately in LR.