I still think the collection (mentioned below) is the best deal though. You’ll save $100 off the price of Viveza so that takes it down to $150. Again, that one’s up to you.ĮDIT: Holy Crap! I just realized late this morning, there’s a NAPP member discount running until March 16. If making great photos is a passionate hobby, but you don’t necessarily enjoy the tedious selecting and editing process, then Viveza may enhance your enjoyment of photography and post-processing. If you’re not a pro photographer or making money from your photography then you’ll need to figure out if it’s right for you and your budget.

Then after 60 images you’ll have paid for the product (I’m assuming a $50/hour rate). Say Viveza saves you 5 minutes per image in time of brushing and masking in LR or PS (and I think it easily saves you that much). I’ll be the first to say it because I know somebody reading will 🙂 As a professional photographer, I can tell you that you WILL make your money back. If you already own Viveza, then the Lightroom plug-in upgrade is free. With a plug-in like Viveza, you can easily show an assistant how to enhance the brightness or color of one part of a photo, without teaching them the nitty gritty details of Photoshop or Lightroom. Not everyone who works on photo is a Photoshop wiz. The other reason a lot of folks like Viveza is because it has a significantly easier learning curve vs. And you don’t have to worry about using the Adjustment Brush tool in Lightroom (or Camera Raw) to brush in a small area to brighten it without affecting everything else. You don’t have to select or create any sort of mask to do this. Using the photo above, if you wanted to brighten the brides dress you’d simply drop a control point on it and increase the Brightness setting. There’s a few reasons you’d look at a plug-in like Viveza. All in all, I’ve been really happy with it when I need it.

I have seen some spill over from the control point area into surrounding areas but it’s always been minimal in the photos I’ve used it for. In practice, I’ve found it works very well and most of the time it saves me a lot of hassle. You simply drop the control point on to an area in the photo and then selectively control that color or tone in the photo without affecting everything else. The idea behind it is that you don’t have to worry about selections or masks (things that typically take the most time in Photoshop). Viveza uses something called U Point Technology. Finally, you can increase the brightness, contrast or enhance color of whatever you dropped the control point on. Then you control how big of an area they affect. Viveza let’s you drop these little control points (dots) on to parts of your photo. If you think about it, what are the two biggest keys to your photos besides the subject? Color and light. Nik’s Viveza is a plug-in that’s extremely simplistic in nature. They also make Capture NX – the full photo editing program.

Nik Software makes a lot of other popular plug-ins like Silver Efex Pro (for black and whites), Color Efex (for special effects), and Dfine (for noise removal). Okay, now on to the review.Īs I mentioned, this one comes to us from Nik Software. The Viveza plug-in has been on my favorite list for a while and I think it’s actually one of the easiest plug-ins to use too. True story: when I had to wipe out my laptop a couple months back and reinstall everything from scratch, Nik’s plug-ins were one the first things I installed after installing Photoshop. First off, I’m a big fan of Nik’s filters. It was just announced last week and already has a lot of chatter around the industry. This time around we’ll take a look at the newest LR plug-in: Nik Software’s Viveza Plug-in for Lightroom 2.

As soon as I sort them out, I’ll post the video so check back later in the morning. There’s also a quick 2-minute video demo but I had a couple problems with the video. Now, since more and more of them seem to be integrated with Lightroom I figured I’d start picking away at some of the popular ones and doing a quick review on them. I see this all the time in comments, forums, and questions from people I meet. Plug-ins are getting really popular these days.

Nik collection viveza