Having said all of that, Viveza is not one of the strongest components of the Nik Collection. Conclusionsįor those used to the precise, controlled world of selections and masks, Viveza’s control points might feel vague and unsatisfactory, but if you stick with it and you’re prepared to work in a looser, more intuitive way, you may start to see the benefits. I started off with one of the new presets, then used a series of Control Points to darken the bright background, then three grouped Control Points to add contrast, brightness and structure to the iron furnace, center. Here’s a more complex set of Viveza adjustments. The new luminance and chrominance masking sliders let you refine your control point selections still further, but I’m not a big fan of the relocation of the adjustment sliders to the sidebar. When I’ve used it I’ve found myself creating effects that I wouldn’t have thought of producing in another program, purely because the control point adjustment method has led me to approach the process more intuitively.Īnd while, individually, control points can look like a somewhat crude and imprecise way of selecting and adjusting areas of a picture, when they’re used together and, in particular, when you use two ‘competing’ control points close together, they do actually produce very precise and natural-looking tonal transitions around object edges. But if you take a little more trouble, create groups of adjustments and start experimenting with ‘relighting’ your photos, you start to understand what Viveza can do.Īrguably, there’s nothing here that you couldn’t do with layers and masks in Photoshop or local adjustments in PhotoLab, Lightroom or Capture One, but Viveza encourages you to visualise and build your adjustments in a different way. You can add a single control point, make a couple of adjustments and wonder what all the fuss is about. Viveza’s strength only emerges gradually. However, it seems to suffer from the same glitch as Silver Efex Pro, where it sometimes opens in plug-in mode even when launched separately, making it impossible to open and save files. Like the rest of the Nik Collection plug-ins, Viveza 3 works as a plug-in for Lightroom and Photoshop and DxO PhotoLab, but can also be used as a standalone program. In Vizeza 3 you can now create and apply presets and, as with Silver Efex Pro 3, you can save Control Point adjustments within a preset. These last two adjustments are not quite how they sound, since you’re already working with a processed TIFF or JPEG image and there’s no additional color or tonal information to recover like there is with a RAW file. Outside of these control points, the only controls is a global levels/curve adjustment and new White Balance and Selective Tones adjustments (Highlights, Midtones, Shadows, Blacks). That brief description describes pretty much everything Viveza does. You can duplicated control points and their settings and group control points so that they act as one – it’s a way of adjusting large and complex areas quickly. With each one you can adjust Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Structure, Shadow Adjustment, Warmth, Red, Green and Blue and Hue. The control points in Viveza are more sophisticated than those in the other Nik plug-is, however. Another new feature of Viveza 3 is the one-click presets in the left sidebar. Here I’ve been able to lighten the center pot to match the tone and color of the pots either side. Each Control Point has a button to display its mask, and you can use the new Chrominance and Luminance sliders to target the tones you want to adjust precisely. How does it work? Viveza 3 uses Control Points for local adjustments. The best way to think of Viveza is as the colour equivalent of the dodging and burning tools you might use in black and white.īut DxO says that Viveza is one of the collection’s most popular plug-ins and, along with Silver Efex Pro, has given it a big upgrade for the Nik Collection 4 release, adding in new presets, more advanced Control Point masking with Luminance and Chrominance sliders, and a new interface which shifts the local adjustments to the sidebar instead of having them attached to the Control Points themselves. This was always a bit of an odd addition to the Nik Collection in that it didn’t have any creative presets, just the same Control Point adjustments found throughout the Nik Collection suite. Viveza 3 is a major update of Viveza, the Nik Collection’s color adjustment plug-in.
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