Viveza
Viveza Book Launched
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.
My Photoshop Skills are Obsolete
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.
