Testing Viveza and Your Opinion
Photography, as an art form, is continual process of learning and improvement. The digital process only enhances the slope of the learning curve and increases by ten-fold the opportunities for self-improvement and discovery of one’s individual, artistic vision.
This is one of the reasons why I think the majority of pro shooters out there gravitate toward Apple. The company is driven by the input and needs of their customers, not only with hardware but increasingly as it applies to software development.
I love Apple Aperture. Sure I still use Photoshop CS3, but now I use Aperture for about 99% of my editing and post-production work.
And now with the release of 2.1 with plug-in capabilities, Aperture is poised to challenge head-on the great Yamato of the Adobe fleet.
A third-party plug-in for Aperture that was just released today is Nik Software’s Viveza. This is an incredibly powerful and easy to use plug-in that allows the photographer to adjust brightness, contrast and saturation by pin-point color selection, but in a way that is thoroughly smooth and not nearly as clumsy as adjustment layers in PS.
The problem is the plug-in’s price tag of $249.00. Ouch ! Good thing Nik provided a 15-day trial version.
I’ve gone through and applied Viveza (I like the name because it reminds me of ‘velvia’) to some of my favorite portfolio photographs. Another benefit of working in Aperture is that the original, raw image files are automatically protected.
Take a look and let me know what you think -
First image is non-Viveza. Second image is with Viveza.
