Nik Software - Viveza 2
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Please e-mail me if you'd like a copy of Viveza 2
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Viveza
2 is a real image and time saver and we at Africa Imagery can very
definitely recommend that you include it in your work flow, especially
when you have those difficult pix that just need a little something to
make them pop.
Viveza 2 uses what Nik call "U-Point technology" which is a short way
of saying "you point where you want to edit". While it is possible to
do everything that Viveza can do in Photoshop it just takes that much
longer and for those of us that are not Photoshop Masters, it actually
makes many things possible.
If you need to adjust a portion of an image, all you need to do is
click on the spot on the image that you want to adjust, a Control Point
appears and, using the various sliders, you simply adjust the image to
your liking. You can enhance brightness, contrast, saturation,
structure, shadows, red, green, blue, hue and warmth, all in the area
you've selected. Group Control Points together or copy and paste them
to apply changes across a larger area. It really saves a great deal of
time and we've rescued images using Viveza 2 that were headed for the
bin.
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This
image was shot using the Nikon P300 on a cloudy rainy day at Hluhluwe
iMfolozi Game Reserve in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. I found the
background a little light and distracting for my liking.
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From
within Photoshop (or Lightroom if that's where you're working) open up
Viveza 2 and place your control points to adequately cover the area
that you would like to adjust. This quite often means using more than
one and ensuring that there is enough overlap to ensure smooth
adjustments.
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Once
the background has been adjusted (brightness, saturation, structure and
warmth) an addition control point is added to just warm up the flowers
a little to do away with slightly cool colouring because of the
overcast conditions.
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And that's it, took just
a few minutes and the beauty of it is that in Photoshop, the edited pic
is added as a layer so that you can ply with the various layer blending
modes to tweak the image to your liking. Please e-mail me if you'd like a copy of Viveza 2. |
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Here's another example
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We
shot this image while working on our book on African lions and while
the image looks great after a few enhancements (brightening the eyes
and nose) in Adobe Lightroom I still felt that the background was a
little bright. Now, you can deal with this in Lightroom but it really
is easier to do with Viveza.
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From
within Lightroom and after doing all the usual edits, I opened the
image in Viveza, added 3 control points across the sky and darkened it
a little. This seemed to over saturated it a little and a simple slider
adjustment fixed this. I then added 2 control points to the brown
background and dealt with this in a similar way. The whole process took
about a minute! Please e-mail me if you'd like a copy of Viveza 2.
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