NIK Viveza = awesome.

so, after reading this I went ahead and downloaded the trials... At first glance, I gotta say, it does seem like some awesome plugins! I noticed that u can also create the effects and then selectively brush it in too. Thanks for the heads up guys... When u are as horrible at photoshop as I am, u need all the help ya can get

I've been using the suite of plugins from NIK for Aperture for the past week and I love it......... all of them!!!!! Processing time is much quicker in my honest opinion compared to Photoshop and the results are just as great.

Here's one of my samples using Viveza and Color Efex.

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One more sample. This one had minor PP, but still showing the effectiveness of these plugins.

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TheSonofDarwin wrote in post #6846239
Viveza is a lot like ACR except better. It allows you to make points on the image to individually edit all the ACR-esque attributes for certain areas and blends them in nicely together.

*Note: Most of the sliders except 3 are on default and this is a RAW conversion, don't blame Viveza. Just intended to show you what it offers in terms of tools.

Obviously you can do the same thing in PS and although I agree masking to one's heart's content is fun, sometimes it's nice to be able to do something quickly.

I love Nik Color Efex Pro much more than Viveza, but those are definitely my most used.

How do you get those extra sliders under saturation?

The output sharpening plugin is super cool - I love how it tailors sharpening to the final medium, and the ability to edit sharpening on textures and local contrast can really add a huge amount of pop to an image from sharpening alone.

The video tutorials on their site really help too.

perryge wrote in post #6847060
How do you get those extra sliders under saturation?

If you look at the control point carefully, there is actually another small down arrow that you can click to expand it

aIpha wrote in post #6847161
If you look at the control point carefully, there is actually another small down arrow that you can click to expand it

Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet. Thanks! Man this software is gonna speed up my workflow so much! Props to NIK (any affiliation with Nikon?).

While I use Silver and Color Efex often,Viveza is well on its way to becoming indispensable!

Well, I take an opposing view. I've had viveza on my machine for quite some time. I thought it was great at first, but no longer use it. I have found that I can accomplish the same thing with adjustment layers and masks much more accurately than with viveza. I do NOT like that radius function.

On the other hand, the NIK SilverEfex filter is probably one of the top five most impressive plugins I have ever seen. Truly good stuff.

I tried Viveza and I like it a lot. I think it could help me to quickly salvage some of the badly exposed real estate photos I review every day at my office, photos that I normally would reject because I don't have more than a couple minutes to work on them. But the real estate company I work for is in belt-tightening mode and there is no way that they would purchase new software right now.

I am also a fan of Efex and Silver but I swear I hate the Nik sharpening tool. Maybe I just don't know how to use it. Every thing I do with it looks waaaay over sharpened, but I have been told to print one off and see how it looks. That images that appear slightly oversharpened in PS print out very nicely.

Greg

Have u guys played with nik's dfine? The software is amazing! They claimed it was the best noise reduction software out there (they all claim that right?) anyway, I had my uncles graduation pic which I thought was totaly ruined because it was completey covered in white speckles.... I decided just to play with the dfine to see what it could do, I wasn't expecting much! The results were absolutely incredible! I'm at work now so I can't post, but as soon as I get home I will post the before and after. I am absolutely sold on nik soft... I will be buying all of thier plugins as soon as I get home! I have no doubt that some of the gurus in ps out there could have gotten similar results with out using the plugin... I personally wouldn't even know where to begin, and with the plugin it was fixed in under two minutes... Would of been half that if I had ever used it before! Amazing!!!

G-money... I had trouble with the Sharpening tool when I tried it in the previous version. Back then it had print output sharpening by printer make, but it still seemed oversharpened, even in print. I tried the demo of the latest version and it seems to have condensed and simplified the user interface and it's not so harsh. I still have to crank the default settings way back.

And martial76... Same thing... I tried a demo of the previous incarnation of Dfine and hated it. I've been using Noiseware Pro for a long time. But I just tried a demo of the new Dfine and I'm liking it a lot! Maybe Santa will bring me the whole suite for Christmas!

Doesn't the adjustment brush in Lightroom 2 do much of the same thing as Viveza?

martial76, that's the cool thing with the NIK plugins. Once you launch one of them, they automatically do a default edit of your image, which for the most part looks pretty darn good and in some cases........ good enough.