I recently read a DOCMA article about the new Nik Collection 7, which more or less pointed out that DFine, Sharpener and HDR (tonemapping) Efex are now completely out of date. Vivenza is almost integrated into Color Efex and therefore obsolete.
I’ve been a Nik user for many years (from the pre-Google era) and basically this coincides with my experiences. For me, Nik is above all the powerful Color Efex and the outstanding and unique Silver Efex. That’s why I’ve always bought a new version over the past few years. Now I’m taking a break until NIK launches a product that integrates Color Effex and Silvereffex and thinks about what else they could offer (AI-efex?)
DXO has shown in recent years with PR4 that it can mould performance and usability into an excellent product.
i think you read it from another point of view. the “out dated” for some efex plugin are just based on what software can do now, look at pre-sharpener and Dfine, who need that if PL does an awesome job at demosaic and denoise images?
i think dxo should had work more on PL features that has been requested for years instead of keeping working on nik that got fully upgraded with Nik 6. there’s been so many that it’s hard to find all request made as far as i can remember, but let start with this one… having nik working non destructive within PL.