PhotoWalkPro

I thought I would follow up yesterday’s review of the Nik Software Viveza filter plug-in with an actual example of one of my images processed with the filter.  So here you see the original image straight from the camera.  The only operation I performed to the RAW image in Camera Raw was a little Clarity and Sharpening.  Everything else on the image was set to the Camera Raw defaults.

After I opened the image in Photoshop CS3, I opened the Viveza filter and started making my selections and adjustments.  I selected one flower and adjusted it to my liking and then duplicated the control point multiple times to apply the same corrections to the other flowers.  I also placed points on the pot, the wood shelf, and the background.  Here is a look at the placed points using the Before-and-After comparison view.

And just so you get an idea of how much control there is with the selections in Viveza, take a look at this Selection View of one of the flowers.  Remember that the white areas represent the selections.

So now here is the after shot with the Viveza filter layer dropped down to 88% opacity.

Finally, I did some burning using an additional grey layer on top of the layer stack.  I set the blend mode to Overlay and painted with a black brush set to 15% opacity.  I also cropped the image to get rid of the extraneous stuff.

I created an alternately cropped version just for fun.  I haven’t decided which one I like best.  I can say this, all of the processing took about 5 minutes from beginning to end.  If I had to try and do all the masking and selecting necessary to perform the same level of processing with the traditional methods it would have taken me at least an hour.

Related posts:

1. Using the Viveza 2 Plug-In from Nik
2. Nik Hits Another One Out of the Park with Viveza 2
3. Anatomy of a Lightroom Beta 2 Image Correction
4. Double Processing with the New Lightroom 2.0 Beta
5. Don’t Forget the Plug-Ins

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 12:05 am and is filed under Image Processing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.