Tag Archives: Viveza

Friday Image

Friday Image No. 151

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The Trinnacle, Saddleworth
The Trinnacle, Saddleworth. Fuji X-T2, Fujinon 10-24mm, ISO200, 1/9″ at f/11.0. Tripod and 0.9 ND Grad.

In my previous post, I mentioned the Trinnacle rock that my friend Dave wanted to photography. Today I thought I would share an image that I shot that evening. The Trinnacle is the rock on the left and from this angle you can’t see there are three pillars (hence the name).

The image was captured on the Fuji X-T2 with a Fujinon 10-24mm lens. This is a great lens for landscape work and doesn’t seem to suffer from much distortion. It’s also produced a very detailed image here despite my processing the RAW file in Lightroom. I really must try reprocessing it using Iridient. I expect the detail will be superb.

I also had the camera mounted on a tripod and used a 0.9 (3 stop) ND graduated filter on the sky. This helped to balance the exposure of the sky with the valley and the Trinnacle rock.

In terms of processing, the conversion from the RAW was done in Lightroom, which I also used to liven up the heather. It’s a little late for heather now and I had to breathe new life back into it by enhancing the red in this area. I then enhanced it further using the free Nik Viveza software and control points (see my book if you want to know more about using Viveza).

I hope you like the image and have a great weekend.

Book

Mastering Nik Viveza – Latest Edition

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Mastering Nik Viveza

Do you have the first edition of my Viveza book? You might like to know there is a free and substantial update available. The new version is now on Amazon and if you contact their help team you can get the update.

If you’re a member of my Lenscraft website, the latest version is also free until the end of July. You can find it in the Lenscraft Creative Store. Just be sure to log in before purchasing to receive the 100% discount.

Enjoy

Approach, Friday Image, Software

Friday Image No. 110

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Cornish sunset. Olympus EM5 processed using Nik Viveza.
Cornish sunset. Olympus EM5 processed using Nik Viveza.

This isn’t a deliberate ploy to post the same image as last week. This image was taken at the same time as last week’s Friday image but the lighting is stronger. The reason it looks stronger is that the image is processed using Nik Viveza. When I did this, I employed a few adjustment tricks that people might not realise to try. I decided to share these “Secrets of Viveza” using a video which is posted on my you tube channel. I also embedded the clip below.

I hope you find it useful and have a great weekend.

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Digital Photography, photography, Workflow

Viveza Book Launched

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I started using Viveza out of curiosity and it’s become an essential part of my colour workflow. I can achieve complex edits in minutes that would have taken me hours in Photoshop previously. It’s also allowing me to work almost exclusively in Lightroom.

This is just a short post to share that my Viveza book (covering Viveza 2) is now live in the Kindle store on Amazon. It’s priced at USD2.99 which comes out at about GBP1.94 depending on the exchange rate. The book covers all aspects of using the Viveza 2 software and is backed up by image files that can be downloaded from the members’ area of my Lenscraft website.

If you have never tried Viveza I can promise that it will speed up your image editing hugely and that it’s well worth trying the 15 day free trial from the Nik website. My book would of course help you get more out of the evaluation – but then I’m biased.

Here is the link to the book on Amazon.

After the very relevant question from Paul I thought it best to add this link to the Free Kindle Reader download on Amazon as it’s not easy to find.

More Lightweight Photographer posts next week.

 

Digital Photography, photography, Workflow

My Photoshop Skills are Obsolete

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This image shot on a 5D was enhanced in a mater of minutes using Viveza. The same results in Photoshop would have taken far longer.

For a long time now I have been a user and enthusiast for Photoshop. I am however a strong advocate of making photography light weight in all respects and that includes post processing images. I don’t want to be sat behind a computer for hours on end when I could be out taking pictures. No, my life and time are far too valuable for that and this was one of the drivers for me switching to Lightroom. I had reasoned that Lightroom could give me similar results to Photoshop but perhaps, from everything I had read, much faster.

Well, Lightroom is faster, especially where you want to apply the same adjustments to a group of images. It also makes finding an image a breeze and I wouldn’t be without it now. It is not however a replacement for Photoshop and I find that images adjusted in Lightroom still need some extra “polishing” in Photoshop in order to reach their best. It’s not therefore the huge timesaver I had hoped for.

What has caught me completely unawares however is a Photoshop plug-in from Nik Software called Viveza. It’s a very simple application to use and is accessed from within Photoshop but also integrates with Lightroom. What this plug-in gives me is the ability to make key adjustments to my images whilst targeting specific areas. For example I can edit the blue in a sky whilst leaving the ground and clouds unchanged. Yes I could do this in Photoshop but it would take some delicate selections to ensure I did this with a seamless blend, all of which takes time. With Viveza it takes just minutes, looks completely natural and requires much less skill than with Photoshop.

Having now used Viveza for a couple of months through Lightroom I am finding I do less and less in Photoshop. In fact, it’s got to the stage now where I think I can achieve better results with Viveza than I can using Photoshop. My Photoshop skills, painfully built up over years, now seem largely obsolete.