If you are doing much digital image processing, you are probably aware of the great tools from NIK Software. Calling these tools Photoshop filters is doing them an injustice. They are, for many photography professionals and avid amateurs, core tools. They are also free from the confines of Photoshop-only, integrating with Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture — great image processing tools in their own right.
The NIK product line includes:
- Sharpener Pro (the tool that started it all!)
- Color Efex Pro
- DFine
- Silver Efex Pro
- Viveza
- HDR Efex Pro
They also created one of the key technologies that makes Nikon Capture NX such a great piece of manufacturer-provided RAW image conversion software.
It’s not like me to focus on a single vendor and spotlight a product, but these tools have proven their effectiveness and quality to me daily over the years I’ve been using them. However, in attending an event presented by NIK recently about their new HDR Efex Pro, it became clear to me that some people don’t exactly “get” why these tools are so useful.
U Point Technology
Rather than go into a laundry list of everything each tool does, I’m going to point out the concept I feel is most important to grasp in order to unlock the potential of these tools. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll only talk about Viveza — a tool whose name discloses little about what it does. All the other tools have similar interfaces, so picking only one is not necessarily doing a disservice to the others.
Viveza — What Does It Do?
In my mind, Viveza is a tool that allows you to selectively adjust various attributes of a selected tonal range. Don’t let the fancy words put you off, using it is much simpler than describing it. Here’s an example: Say you have an image of a vineyard and you think, “nice pattern, but the dirt didn’t come up as red as I remembered it, the leaves of the vines were way greener, and the clouds had lots more relief.” If you’re like me and process a lot of images, that kind of images is one that might get punted as a rescue project. But with Viveza — and more particularly, U Point — it’s pretty darn easy to make the kind of adjustment I described.
Let’s Get to A Picture
A picture is worth 1,000 words, so here we go. I used Photo > Edit In > Viveza 2 from Lightroom to open the Lightroom Viveza plugin. Here is the image, and you can see it needs some help.
Global Adjustments
The first thing I would do is to work on overall exposure and color, which is what Viveza does when in “Global” mode (i.e., no control point selected). The sliders on the right control these global adjustments. These should be familiar to you, as they are pretty much the same ones as you see in Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW. Although you can’t see it in the screen grab, you can affect:
- Brightness
- Contrast
- Saturation
- Structure
- Shadow Adjustments
- Warmth
- Red
- Green
- Blue
- Hue
Of these, structure is the only one that is really foreign to most non-Viveza (or non-NIK software) users. I think of structure as being similar to clarity in Lightroom or definition in Aperture. Nobody really says what it does, but my interpretation of the image changes is that there is a subtle increase in midtone contrast. That also increases the appearance of sharpness without the haloing and pixel damage caused by one of the more traditional sharpening algorithms.
The image I chose was properly exposed and the tones pretty evenly distributed so for this example, I left the global adjustments alone.
Adding a Control Point
If you don’t get anything else out of this blog post, get this: Control points are the most important thing you can learn about any of the NIK tools. And… it’s not like using the pen tool in Photoshop. This one is easy. To do it, I just click the control point icon:
and place it on the area I want to affect. In this case, I want to make the earth redder.
Here’s where the real power comes into play. What that little ladder-like thingie I placed there does is allow me to change the tonal values of just the colors under the point. Now, I tell U Point how much of the image (roughly) I want to affect. I do this by grabbing the slider marked by the circular blob and dragging it left or right. You’ll see a circle expand or contract to describe the areas considered by Viveza for the correction:
As you can see, the circle encompasses the dirt, but also the green vines and some of the sky. If you’re familiar with Photoshop selection, you might be thinking, “this is a nightmare … it’ll never work,” but check out what Viveza thought about it:
I select the show/hide mask for all control points icon and presto!
As you can see, the white areas are the only areas Viveza will target for the adjustments. The subtlety and detail of this mask is amazing and the amount of work I did to get it was almost zero. So now I press that show/hide mask icon again and drag a few sliders around to achieve the effect. Note that because the control point is selected, I can use the sliders in the main part of the interface as equivalent to those on the control point “ladder.”
I increased the warmth, red, yellow (that is, decreased the blue), increased saturation and reduced brightness. If you compare this to the image at the top of this post, you’ll see two things. First, the vines and sky were completely unaffected by this change because of the precision of the mask. Second, the earth is now redder as it was in the original scene.
Finishing the Adjustments
To complete the adjustments, I added a control point centered on one of the leaves of the grape vines. The circle was extended to cover the entire field. I added green and increased the saturation. Additionally, I added a control point in the clouds and extended the circle to cover the entire sky. For this adjustment, I added structure and contrast, while reducing the brightness.
And the Wrap-Up
The real power, to me, of the NIK tools is their ability to cut masks with precision and subtlety so I can control the color and intensity of various parts of the image. As important is the ability to do this fast. I have a lot of post-processing to do, so anything that impedes this is a non-starter. Viveza is a great example of a tool that enhances rather that blocking productivity.
Give it a try. NIK has demo downloads available on their Web site, so you can test drive. They also have lots of tutorial material online so you can get more detailed information about all their products.