PhotoWalkPro

I spent some time this evening just playing around with the Nik Color Efex Pro 3.0 Complete filter effects.  There are so many filters and variations that it’s easy to get lost in the filter dialog box for hours.  Here are a few that I was working on this evening.  If you don’t own this great filter pack, head on over to Nik and download the trial version.  It will be worth the effort.

The last image also has an edge effect I picked up from Cory over at Planet Photoshop.  Check out his “Borders in Under a Minute” tutorial.  It’s pretty slick!

I’ll see you Monday, hopefully with some updated Georgetown details, and maybe an image or two to wet your appetites.  Until then, have a great weekend!

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.