Was going to start a thread about this. Glad to see someone beat me to it.
The Nik suite can do many things, but one of the more useful is the ability to easily make local adjustments within an image.
An example where I was okay with the overall exposure, but the eyes were underexposed and the bridge of the nose was overexposed resulting in desaturated colors.
It was fairly easy using the Nik software to create control points where I could selectively adjust exposure and saturation to the portions of the image that needed fixing without having to create complex masks in Photoshop. The software is pretty good at integrating focal edits that blend seamlessly into the surrounding image, resulting in a final image that isn't obviously over-processed.
The suite works really well with Lightroom (and Aperture). The only downsides to the plugin version is that it requires a TIFF image for edits which dramatically increases file size. The changes are also non-editable after the fact, so if you aren't happy with the outcome you have to redo the entire process later. Having said that, it's a pretty amazing tool for post.
The fact that it is now free is awesome. Makes me worried that it's not going to be updated going forward and will quit working at some point in the near or not-too-distant future.
