DxO Webinar on the Nik Collection 2 / Sculpting light using Viveza with Dan Hughes

[Music] [Music] all right so ladies and gentlemen my name is Dan Hughes I'm the former webinar trainer from Nik software I was the webinar trainer from 2009 to basically 2014 and since then I've I've started teaching at the Rochester Institute of Technology I teach photography in the photographic science department and I'm I'm in Rochester New York right now actually in the basement of my friend's studio print studio and we're in his scanning suite which he's let me use for conducting these webinars because I don't have a decent spot at my house to conduct these kinds of webinars Leo you said you can't see the screen you shouldn't be able to see me you should just be able to see the screen and if you can't see the the Nik software screen you know I can switch over to the webinars log out of the webinar and log back in it should it should fix you right up if not we might have a different problem and I actually don't know how to solve that one all right so it's a minute or two after 11:30 this webinar is being recorded so if you've got a skip out or if you want to watch it over again you can totally do that it's gonna be emailed out I think tomorrow at some point I think it's like 24 hours after the webinar actually finishes you get an email with all that now if you do have any questions feel free to type them into the questions box there and your GoToWebinar control panel I've actually hidden that control panel for now I will sort of go back to it every once in a while if there are questions that I can answer quickly and sort of their pertinent to whatever we're talking about at the time I'll just answer them now or at the time if not what we'll do is I'll save them until the end we'll have you know 15 20 minutes or however much time we need to answer any questions that you might have so I'm on the DxO Nik software website right now there's a few things that I just want to mention right off the bat and that's like the the the deal of the month the launch deal for purchasing the software if you don't already have it there is a trial that you can download and it's a full-featured unlock trial so definitely give that a try especially after the webinar if you haven't already used the software to check out the trial and then you can get basically it's $50 off until the end of June to purchase the software if you don't already have it and the webinars you found this webinar so I'm assuming you either got an email about the webinars saw this little pop-up when visiting the Nik software website or you somehow found the webinar page and these webinars I think are posted until June the end of June yep but Joseph Len ASCII and I will be conducting webinars into July and August and hopefully indefinitely because it's a lot of fun and I love sharing this stuff and I'm sure Joseph does as well he puts on a great show so I'm gonna minimize the website for now I'll try and answer any questions that are in regards to you know your software whenever we possibly can I'm going to be launching the software primarily from Photoshop today and then we'll also take a look at launching the software from photo lab 2 because when you buy the Nik collection now you actually get photo lab two essentials included and photo lab 2 essentials this is a RAW processing software it's actually a fully functional organizational and post-processing tool I'll show you that it comes with in the collection at this point it's wonderful and I want to talk about why it's kind of wonderful when we get to that point for now though I'm in Photoshop I want to walk us through utilizing the Nik collection I'm just gonna open up the control panel to make sure that everything's good looks like it okay so nobody's having any problems perfect so I've opened into Photoshop I just realized that my NIC selective tool didn't pop up automatically I must have closed it when I was using the NIC or the Photoshop interface last time and there are two ways to access the software one is the NIC selective tool I'll show you how to get to that if it's not popping up in your Photoshop of the screen and then also if you go to the filter drop down menu and go to the NIC collection you'll find you'll find the entire Nick sweet populated there under the filter collection now if you're a Lightroom user what we would do is in your Lightroom catalog in the develop module there's there's actually a few different ways of accessing the Nik collection the the easiest way that I can think of is if you right click on the image while you're in Lightroom go to edit in if you have the Nik collection installed into Lightroom the collection should show up there except for HDR FX Pro that actually shows up in an export dialog so you would right-click you'd go to export and then you'd find the HDR FX Pro - we can talk about that later on as well for now let's go find the Nick selected tool because it's not populating on my screen here I'm gonna go up to the file drop down menu down to automate and then click on the Nik collection selective tool and what this does as I click on it is it pops up this handy-dandy Nick selective tool so we can access all of the plugins from this floating palette I tend to leave this open because I'm using the Nick collection as much as I do so this is actually just usually open on my screen and ready to go so that I can access the visa or color effects or silver or whatever tool we want to be using now jumping right into the vaso - i want to talk about the interface we'll talk about how it works here in Photoshop I'm gonna expand out the interface in fact the first time you open the software it's going to look probably exactly like this you can do two things you can either hit the green button in the upper left corner if you're on a Mac or the expand button if you're on a PC or and what I will do typically is I'll just move this into the upper left corner expand the window out to go fullscreen here and then I actually shouldn't have to adjust that anymore it should just open fullscreen just like this so the handy little tool now the vaso - is a piece of software for controlling light in color there are global adjustments which means we would affect the entire photo as we make adjustments maybe with the tools palette on the right side right now you can see if you follow my cursor on the right side it says global and then we can also do selective adjustments using control points it's a really powerful tool here I'm actually finding myself using the visa to less and using the control points that are built into photo lab two more and I'll talk about why that is later but if you're a Photoshop user or a Lightroom user you're probably going to want to stick with the visa to here unless you you want the other capabilities of photo lab again I'll get into that later not this time they're not at this time so we've got our photo we're open into the Veda - we've got a little bit of metadata in the lower left corner you can actually see the file that I'm using is a little bit small it's the only version of this image that I have but I think it's a this is an effective photo for describing what the visa to does and if you follow me to the right side of the interface your interface might actually launch this way so you'll have brightness contrast saturation and the structure sliders on the right side here if you want to expand to all of your tools set you can actually click on the expand button or just tap e on your keyboard and that's going to expand so that you've got beyond structure you've got shadow adjustments warmth red green blue hue and these are some of the the key tools built into this software you have of course all of your contrast adjustments but then you have these these really highly malleable color controls again both globally and selectively now what do I mean by global when I say global what I mean is that if I adjust one of these sliders it's going to affect the entire image so if I take the contrast slider and slide it to the right it's adjusting the whole photo if I take my shadow adjustment slider slide that to the left it's gonna be darkening down any of the things that the software finds to be shadow so that would be basically if we looked at this histogram down here the histogram stuff on the right was gonna be the very brightest values the stuff on the left obviously the very the darkest values the shadows and then the shadow adjustment slider is gonna affect the stuff more so on the left side of that histogram so if we adjust this to the right or to the left we can basically control the density the brightness of the stuff that's dark the shadows and then I like what's happening here with these two simple global adjustments contrasts and shadow adjustments let's just take a quick look at the before and after if you follow my cursor into the upper left corner and we click this preview checkbox off you see the before click the preview checkbox back on and we'll see the after in fact just to go through this I'm gonna increase structure overall in the image I'm just gonna bump the saturation way up so that we can see some pretty major changes following me back over to the left side of the interface we have three different views that we can work with we have a split preview which cuts the image down the middle on the left is the original on the right is the enhanced you can actually click on that little red line drag that back and forth this is all three of these previews are built into the entire Nick sweet so once you become comfortable with one of these interfaces your going to be able to navigate all of them pretty well obviously the visa two is designed for adjusting light and color specifically on a color image and the control points become really important in that regard as well because we can go in and adjust individual values of different portions of the photo I clicked on the side-by-side preview and so what this is showing us is on top of is the original and on the bottom is the enhanced photo in between the two images you have a twirler which basically makes it so that on the left you have the original and on the right you have the enhanced image it's just three different ways of viewing the work that you've been doing on your image moving over to the right upper corner we've got a couple tools a built in here you've got your sort of like a hand or sorry your select tool it's basically the standard tool that your your cursor is always going to be on by default you have a hand tool or pan tool so if you're zoomed in you can actually pan around the image and then have a zoom in and zoom out functionality as well and so that's actually a little bit different than some of the other plugins in that the zoom functionality is slightly different in some of the tools this one's relatively straightforward though so I'll leave it at that now getting back into the tools palette on the right side I'm gonna go ahead and double click on each of my sliders that's going to home the slider gets it back to its original default and the reason I'm gonna do this is because I I really only want to adjust this image selectively maybe will adjust the shadow adjustments I kind of like what's happening with that down about negative 40 or so and selective adjustments using control points are exceedingly quick and easy all I have to do to basically draw the attention of the viewer around the image is place points on the objects that we want to adjust and then control them as opposed to if I was within another piece of software I might need to make a complex selection and to do that like in the water here and to really sort of bring out the texture in the water and the color in here and then the effect of the sand and the similar but different fashion that would be a lot of work and we'd have to create these really complex masks to be able to do that with the visa - all you have to do is click the add control point button on the right side and then literally just click and drop the point on the object that you want to adjust from here the control point makes a selection of the object that you placed the point on and it's going to be making a selection of the similar tone color and texture basically of the object that you've placed the point on note how there's a circle that's going around the control point we're not making a circular selection here we're making a selection inside of the circle of the object so if I go to brightness or contrast or adjust saturation or structure what should happen is we're really only going to be affecting that rock and anything that the control point thinks is similar to that rock and so right now if I go and I really adjust this and darken it maybe add a little bit of structure which is going to be this really wonderful texture adjustment and add a little bit of contrast what you can see is that the reflection in front of the rock is going to be affected and then a little bit in this area is gonna be affected in fact it to kind of check the work what I want to do is move over to the right side of the interface where it says control points and if I click the hopefully you can see this it's pretty small in the interface if I click the little checkbox that's to the left of control point one in our control point list we'll be able to see a before and an after right and so what that point is doing is it's making the adjustments that we've adjusted in the sliders and it's trying to make a really smart photographic looking selection based upon the point that we drop the control point on what it's not doing very well is it is affecting some areas that I don't want in that I don't want this control point to really be affecting into the sand all that much so what we're gonna do is take another control point so I click the add control point button on the right side place the point in the sand here and the foreground and watch what happens as soon as I drop this point you see how that brightened back up here I'll delete this point in case the latency in the webinar is affecting what you're seeing I'm gonna delete this point by just tapping the Delete key on my keyboard you see it darkened back down and that's because this point is affecting that area what I'm gonna do is just drop the control point in here and it goes and cleans up that selection basically the more control points you add to the image the the smarter if you will each individual control point gets and that's because what's happening as you drop more and more control points maybe as I warm up the sand a little bit add a little bit of yellow by reducing some blue I'll talk about what I'm doing here in a second as well what what I'm doing is adding more control points is each control point communicates with one another and it says okay this control point is on the rock it looks like this and so it selects that and then it informs the rock control point that there's another point here and as we add more and more basically each one gets smarter and just to sort of illustrate that one more time if we move back over into the control point list on the right side and I click on the check box that's on the far right side of the control point list what you're seeing here is the selection that's being made by in this case control point number one anything that's white is going to be affected by that control point anything that's stark black like this area where this point is is not going to be affected by the control point in anything that has a gray tone to it is the the adjustments that we are making with that control point is going to affect these areas a little bit right so you can see that it's a little bit white here and then there's a kind of a gradient as we move out watch what happens if I take this control point and I start moving it around you can see the selection basically changing on the fly right and the idea of these control points aren't necessarily to make the most perfect selection as we know it in terms of cutting something out but rather to make a selection that's going to look photographic and so as we make these adjustments it's going to look clean it's gonna look correct now as I was saying that stuff what I'm doing is I'm actually duplicating this first control point and I'm placing it in the rest of these areas around the sand and so now you can see I've warmed up the sand nicely to duplicate a control point I'm just holding the option key that's on a Mac or an alt if you're on PC and as you hold option and click on the control point you can drag it away a duplicate so hold option click on the control point you want to duplicate and just drag it away that's going to make a duplicate control point so now I have five control points in the sand that are doing a nice job to kind of just warm up the sand a little bit I think we're gonna come back to those in a minute and kind of finagle them a bit more the next thing we're gonna do though to kind of control the viewers attention in the water is to add a little more texture and saturation back into the water so we do this by starting out just adding a control point so I click the add control point button on the right side place the point in the on the object in this case in the water I'm going to increase the saturation some I'm also going to take this structure slider and I'm going to start to bring out some of the texture in the water if I add a lot I'm gonna get a ton of texture in that water this is 100 percent structure you can see that the left side of the image looks completely different than the right side in this case I don't think that that is a appropriate photographically I just want to add a little bit of texture in there I'm gonna take the shadow adjustments down and then of course we can adjust the warmth the red the green and the blue very quickly and easily in fact I'm gonna add maybe five to ten percent blue in the water just to create a color separation from the foreground which we're gonna have warm the middle ground which will have blue cool and a little darker it'll it's going to recede photographically in the background and then up here in the sky I'm gonna kind of leave this misty effect although maybe we can darken down the corners a little bit so let's say I really like the effect of this control point I want to do the same thing over on the right side and in the middle again we duplicate the control point I tend to like the option click and drag sort of control there is another option though if you click on the control point that you want to duplicate and then you tap command C on your keyboard you can then hit command V you get the little crosshair for a new control point and now when I place this point it's going to be a duplicate of whatever the control point was that I duplicated basically so nice and simple and easy I like what I've got now let's take a quick look at the before and after using the preview check box in the upper left corner but we basically transform this this relatively flat linear looking image into something that has some form and depth to it I want to take it one step further I want to warm up and add a little bit more texture to the sand we can do this by clicking on each individual control point right and controlling them separately or we can actually group these control points together so any adjustment we make to the group is going to affect all of those points to do that here in Vevey so too you have to know shortcuts and so within the entire Nick sweet there's a series of shortcuts that you can use I've used a couple of them already the option click and drag to duplicate the command copy command V community you know copy paste shortcut is a nice one to group these points together I first need to highlight all of the points that I want in my group there are two ways to do this I'm gonna do it one way now we're gonna do it another way later if I hold the shift key down on my keyboard and I click on each of the control points that I want to include in my group it's gonna highlight each one of them and then if I hit command G on my key on my Mac keyboard control G if I'm on a PC it's gonna group those points together and now any adjustment I make to this one control point it's gonna adjust all five of these points that we've added in so I'm gonna add a little bit of structure you can see as it sort of snaps to as I add that texture in I'm gonna go ahead and push the one for a little bit further and I'm gonna actually reduce the blue a little bit more and what the heck let's go into the red and add just our green and add a little bit of magenta so one of the beauties of having those RGB controls red green and blue controls is it means I can individually and independently control each aspect of the color of the image and so if there is anyone out there who worked with a color darkroom back in the day or maybe still are working in the color dark room you get those similar kinds of controls it's a red controls sorry red and cyan so if I add red I'm gonna get red if I remove red I'm gonna be removing red and adding cyan going into green green is going to adjust magenta and green so if I add green it's you know we get this certain nucular green looking beach actually the selection is pretty good if I go and reduce that if I bring the green down into the negative we're adding magenta in fact I'm gonna leave that how about zero and then the blue adjustment if I add blue right we get this nice blue control if I reduce blue what we're doing is removing blue and adding yellow and so you know once you get those kinds of color controls down you can go in and adjust any of these aspects quickly and easily and with the utmost control of the individual color channels now I think I've talked enough about this image we're going on you know almost half an hour is we've introduced the interface pretty much and then adjusted the photo but I like what we've got so far all right if I click on the split preview we take one more quick look at the before and after here's our original image we've completely transformed this photograph into something totally different than what it was initially you know for better or for worse I like our adjustments here but I bet you we could probably make them a little more subtle and get a nice really beautiful photo out of it we're all done editing though and when we're done editing and processing the image we move into the lower right corner of the interface click the ok button and that's going to bring us back over into our home interface in this case Adobe Photoshop and in Photoshop what's happening is we're dealing with layers it's one of the reasons why I like using the new collection with Photoshop is the fact that I have layers and then I can adjust the blending mode of that layer I've got layer masks we've got all of the different blending options and controls that you've got within Photoshop in this case in this workflow I don't think we would need that here's the before and here's the after but it is a nice added capability to be able to deal with layers and layer masks and blending modes and so on and so forth when using the Nik collection alright so that's our first image let's let's go ahead and transition into the second photo here we've got a whole other image that we can sort of massage and adjust to direct the viewers attention through the image right we've got this beautiful landscape photo of a bridge I don't remember the bridge 99% sure it's in it's in Italy and this is a John Barclay photograph lent us the image to be able to display and use the visa to on now before I jump into the visa - I'm just gonna check the go to webinar control panel make sure we're good to go we don't have any questions or anything baby and you said it's in your hometown baby and what what is where if you don't mind saying what is the hometown they're very cool by the way Florence oh well that makes sense yeah very cool thanks for letting me know I I feel like I shouldn't have known that I should just mentioned it I completely forgot or just didn't know so Lauren you're saying are the algorithms in Vevey so to enhanced over vases at one absolutely the control points are going to be a lot stronger lot smarter than Vevey so one and then also there are some controls that were added in Vivi's a two that were not within the visa one I'm pretty sure and the vasa one was out in like 2009 and before that so I don't remember all of the details but the visa one I believe had brightness contrast saturation and then red green and blue and I think that the additional tools that are in Veda 2 are the structure tool which is like texture shadow adjustments and then on the the control points the new point technology itself is a newer sort of more powerful or smarter form of the the you point technology good question all right let's transport ourselves to Florence Italy and open up the visa to here so we've got this nice beautiful kind of sunset image right now but in terms of me as the viewer I don't know where I should be looking right there's a lot going on in here and what I want to do is direct the viewers attention around the photograph and we're gonna do this by controlling the contrast the color and the relative brightness levels to sort of direct the viewers attention now we've got these really nice interesting shapes occurring in the image where you know you've got like the the archway of the bridge itself we've got we've got our the water in the river and the reflections that are occurring because of that we've got the blue on the bluish green of the shutters and so on and what I want to do is sort of separate these things and direct the attention towards the middle of the image and in what I say sort of like a circular motion or fashion and so I want to subdue the things I don't want you to look at so much and I want to bring out the things that I want you to spend time looking at and to do that selectively is gonna be the fastest and easiest way I would say and what I'm gonna do is sort of lean back in my chair assess the image and figure that like this area here in the top of the image where the Sun is striking this wall here directly I want to dumb that down I want to darken it down because I don't want your eye to be distracted by that area all that much so I'm gonna place the point on the object size the area so that I'm basically just encompassing that object if I make it too small and I start adjusting this let's say with the brightness it might become noticeable it's not bad with this image if I bring it way down it becomes very noticeable but watch what happens if I expand this out to encompass the entire wall it makes a much smarter better selection of that entire area and so I can go into that brightness value there I can darken that down in this case about 30% I'm also gonna desaturate it just a little bit because if it's darker I'm gonna expect that it's gonna be a little less saturated because those highlights are going to have a lot of color and tone in them especially with direct sunlight striking on them and as I darken it down it subdues the area nicely from there I want to do the same thing in the lower left corner I kind of want to distract your eye away from this although the texture and the bridge is really beautiful I'm gonna place this point down here in the bridge I'm gonna darken those values down just a little bit desaturate just a little bit as well that's gonna pull your eye away from that area and it's gonna push the eyes your attention as the viewer in towards the middle a little bit in fact let's darken that maybe to 15% or so note this as you place your control points I'm I'm pretty confident where I'm placing these control points what it's gonna do but what you can do is kind of experiment a little bit drop the point make the adjustments you think you want and then click on the control point and move it around the different areas because if I place the point in that very bright value there that's gonna make a different selection than if I place the point in maybe this slightly darker value here it's gonna make a completely different selection if I drag it up into the shadows right it's gonna look totally different because now that control point is gonna basically say I want to look for those tones colors and textures as opposed to these brighter values so place the point where you think it should be and then don't hesitate to just pick it up and move it around so that you can make sure you're getting the effect in the control that you want if you're still not sure about exactly where the point is and exactly what the control you know area is going to be affecting you can always move into the control point list on the right side and like I said before if you click on the little checkbox that's on the right side of the control points list it's going to show you the selection that you're making so right now this control point is affecting a lot of areas that maybe I don't want it to but if we come back to this control point later after we've placed several more control points what we'll find is that this point is much more refined in terms of the selection that it's it's doing and making so let's do this the next thing I want to do to really direct your attention is to emphasize colors in some of the buildings and sort of desaturate color in other buildings so some of this some of these buildings have more or less paint on them and I'm gonna sort of exaggerate that a little bit so I'll drop a point on this area that's a little bit D saturated I'm gonna remove more of that saturation and what we're gonna do is create a kind of checkerboarding effect on the image in this checkerboard effect if we're using color in this case by desaturating this area and saturating this area and then D saturating the next one is it's going to yield us sort of more depth and form overall overall so I've I've added my saturation into this building D saturated it from that one I'm gonna duplicate this point right here option click and drag place it right here there it's D saturated that one I'm gonna duplicate at this point and then I'm going to place it in our saturated building and then I'm gonna go ahead and take our D saturated one and this checkerboarding effect this works it's it's a very common technique when you're able to control lighting like in portraiture or in studio lighting you're gonna see this kind of checkerboarding occurring it's very common tactic for controlling the viewers attention in the image because what it does is it separates these objects from each other and it it makes it seem like there's more fidelity it makes it seem like you're actually there it makes it seem like there's tone and texture differences and it's a really straightforward way to kind of control the viewers attention through the image right so let's let's just look at the before and after now because we've made some dramatic changes but it doesn't really look like it so if we check the preview checkbox on and off the here's the original image we're getting there or this was the original photo so we will get there and then here's the enhanced photo right so I'm starting to distract you from the things that I don't want you to look at and then I'm beginning to emphasize the things that I do want you to look at let's add a little bit more contrast you know let's see what happens if we drop a control point on the shutters here and then let's increase that saturation again and then let's add a little bit of green and then add a little bit of blue and now those shutters start to really pop off of that yellow background just with that one control point now to keep our boat on the road if you keep moving along I'm gonna drop some control points into these areas that I want to sort of distract you from and in this case I'm actually adding some texture into the bridge here I'm gonna drop a control point in the lower right corner and we're gonna darken down that corner let's actually drop a control point in this highlight area because now that we've made all of these adjustments this looks a little bit out of control I'm gonna increase saturation in this case I'm gonna darken it down maybe 5 points very subtle a little burn there and then add a touch of contrast as well now one of the tricks to this is to emphasize the things that you wanted the viewers to look at and to de-emphasize the things that you don't want the viewers to look at so the the quickest and easiest way to do that is to darken the stuff you don't want the viewer to look at in to brighten the stuff at least the general rule of thumb is that I can't say that for every single image because it's it's completely image dependent but if we click on a side-by-side preview now and we take a look at that before and after we've made some subtle adjustments right but if if you lean back in your chair here and you look at the before on the left and the after on the right again each of those effects is pretty subtle but I think your eye is going to be attracted more towards that right side image right because we're really directing the viewers attention all subtle adjustments but it makes it seem like we haven't done a thing right so we're almost like hiding the fact that we're controlling this image to the nth degree we're all done editing this photo oh we should go back to control point number three right because we didn't look at the selection again but I bet you when we click on it yeah now we're really only selecting out that portion of the bridge because each of these other control points is smartening up the rest of our selections really honing it in we're all done editing so I'm gonna click the okay button in the lower right corner brings us back over into Photoshop and in Photoshop we have our layers so before and after all right so I'm just gonna revert back to my GoToWebinar control panel everybody seems like they're good to go let's see all right so Juris I see your question there I'm gonna save that to the end of the webinar if that's okay we've got just one more landscape image I realized when I was logging into the webinar that I had basically three landscape images that I'm starting with so when we're jumping over we will jump over into photo lab two we're gonna start with at least one portrait image I didn't I didn't vary these all that much and I kind of wish I had now that I've logged in and started talking about this stuff so jumping into the Veda - we're gonna make this one much faster right and the reason why I want to make it much faster is because the normal workflow for this sort of thing is to open up your image into visa to look at the photo and assess the photo and figure out what you want to emphasize and what you want to dull down and how you want to direct the viewers attention in this case we've got an image that has this big fluffy cloud in the upper right corner and then we have an InFocus bit of hay in the lower left corner and so these are kind of like opposing forces upper right lower left right same kind of thing is happening here we've got sort of the the lines that are directing the viewers attention towards the middle in the lower right corner same thing happening in the upper left corner so to direct the viewers attention I want to control those aspects in in relation to each other meaning lower left and upper right kind of adjusting in relation to each other and then lower right and upper left and adjusting those things in relation to each other and that hopefully should start to direct the viewers attention towards the center and in a circular manner in a way that you cannot look away right if my intention is to make this photo and print it or make this photo and it's supposed to be an advertisement or it's supposed to be just a stunning image I want you to be sucked in I don't want you to be able to look away so I don't want to give you any exit points I want you to just look around the image continuously forever right so I don't have any global adjustments that I want to make in this case although we haven't talked about the levels and curves tool so why don't we just jump down into the right side of the interface we're in the levels and curves tool you have an RGB option where you'll be affecting all three of the channels at once the red the green and the blue individual color channels so you can actually go in and make a curves adjustment or a levels adjustment that's going to be a global control here with in Vevey so - I'm actually just going to increase the highlights just to touch with the levels adjustment maybe I'll add a little contrast over all that way and I'm gonna take my control points and I'm gonna start placing the points on the objects that we want to affect so I've placed the control point on that upper right corner each adjustment tool or each control point has brightness contrast saturation and structure and so on so let's go ahead and start controlling that I'm gonna reduce the saturation just a touch in those clouds if I go too far it looks really weird clouds should have a tinge of color to them whether it's blue and cool or it's warm because of a sunset or sunrise or anything but in this case I'm going to desaturate that because I'm gonna take a control point in my lower left corner I'm gonna increase the warmth and increase a little bit of saturation and then this is going to be sort of like a direct relationship between that upper left and lower sorry lower left and upper right portion of the image too much once at this point so let's just increase a little bit I'm gonna option click and drag and duplicate this point over into the center I like what's happening here now there's those opposing forces with the warmth in the neutral let's take a control point in the upper left corner now mind you the size of the area of influence is going to affect the adjustment that you're making like if I go into the brightness adjustments and I'd are condone by 13% or so if I then expand this out you can see the control point wants to take control of other stuff basically the things that are within that area the area of influence it's called inside of the circle and it's going to basically look for those similar tones and colors and textures so you do want to be careful with the size that of the area of influence and in this case as I drop the control point on the sky I can basically expand this thing around the entire upper left corner and it's gonna be fine I think I'm actually adjusting a little bit into the shadow area of the grass or of the fields there and the rolling hills if I take this down we can actually get a good feel for that yeah so you can see actually affecting all of this area here I don't want this control point to affect this area so we take a new control point place it in this area and basically now this point recognizes that it should be affecting those similar tones and colors and textures this in this sky point that we dropped it I was burning that corner down way too much darkening down way too much and I didn't want to I just wanted to show you the effect of that control point so I'll go back in and kind of massage that so each point that we drop we're gonna be able to control those individual areas I just want to drop one more control point into this lower right corner I'm gonna darken down the shadow adjustments add a little bit of structure and I'm actually gonna brighten that lower right corner up just a touch just because the light looks like it probably should work that way and now we have an image that has a lot more pop to it a lot more depth and form and we've done all of almost all of our controls anyways that have been selective right so we've sort of just picked the areas that we wanted to direct the viewers attention to and direct distract them away from and then added those points in again making relatively subtle adjustments to each control point but it's sort of the sum of all points if you will that that allows us to go from our relatively flat linear looking image to something that is much more refined with a lot more pop and texture I'm gonna click that OK button in the lower right corner that's gonna bring us back over into Photoshop we've got our final image now for the sake of time I'm gonna jump over into photo lab here and talk about using the Nick plugins from photo lab 2 and I also just want to point out the fact that if I'm in photo lab 2 I haven't found a good use for visit 2 when launching from photo lab 2 and that's because control points you point technology has actually been integrated into this software and the the reason why that's so cool first of all it's it's nice because now I don't have to leave this interface it can just access that stuff but the reason why it's so very cool is that photo lab 2 is a parametric image editing tool and basically that allows us to deal with our raw data our raw files in a non-destructive manner and now with photo lab 2 you can use control points a couple more things sort of in the new release the the Nik software 2 by DX oh just so that I mention these things there there are 40 presets that I developed a couple of months back and those have been integrated into silver effects Pro to color effects Pro analog effects Pro and HDR effects so there are brand new presets that are built directly into the software and then you've got support for high DPI displays on PCs so if you're on a PC and you have a 4k screen the experience you're gonna have is a lot better because the the interface is now malleable to that kind of control so that's a nice little feature and then the the reason why I wanted to bring bring us back or over into photo lab 2 is because we have this you point technology built into photo labs too which is of course D EXO's proprietary RAW processing software now I just want to warm this image up a little bit and crop the photo before I show you the control points the software the interface here is slightly different than other pieces of software but almost the same at the same time somehow meaning it's really pretty straightforward in terms of learning how to use photo lab to you know the crop tool works in a relatively straightforward way your white balance and all of your tools are accessible on the right side of the interface here if there's anybody who shoots infrared photography digital infrared photography I I have switched my entire infrared workflow over into photo lab 2 because the white balance capability is much better here for infrared photography then it is within my standard workflow which was dealing with Lightroom and launching or post-processing using Lightroom so my entire infrared workflow has switched in the past six weeks because just because of that one white balance tool let alone something like DXF smart lighting but that's not what we're here to talk about we're here to talk about is selective post-processing on the raw files using control points so I'm gonna click into the local adjustments tool here in the upper right corner and then basically the default at this point is base is control points but there are a whole bunch of different local adjustment tools that you can use if you right click on the image you'll see a little heads-up display pop-up which is this little guy and you have control point capability there's an auto mask which is a an edge detection brush capability you have an eraser tool if you want to get rid of the effect from an area that you've you've adjusted locally new mask reset a brush function and then also a gradient filter and what we're doing here is as adding all of these kinds of controls including control points to to our workflow and we're dealing with the raw information this is that's the key so the control point here if I go and drop the point on his on his suit here geez I'm at a loss for words today so this this would be a little bit dark for my taste here and I want to brighten it up so in the initial adjustments you've got light you've got color and you've got sharpening or detail adjustments and in the light section you have exposure contrast micro contrast clearview+ which is a algorithm that's proprietary to the DxO software highlights mid-tones shadows and then a blacks adjustment right and you can control all of these aspects let's say you would like the brightness and maybe a little bit of contrast and the beauty of it is now we're dealing with the raw data that that is the coup de Gras I guess that's the best part that I can talk about here and the color you have controls just like with in Vivi's and I guess the reason why I'm showing you this is because if you're going to use photo lab I don't I don't know of a use of the visa - if you're using photo lab with this raw data you don't need it because this will allow you to control that and so if I want to add a new control point and maybe brighten up the highlight on on our bride here I can go into the lightness adjustment I can start brightening that up I can go and maybe go into saturation and start to desaturate her skin tone since I've brightened that up and it looked a little bit funky in terms of color and literally just go and drop points on the areas that that you want to control so my upper left cup a right corner I'm going to darken that down I'm gonna D saturate that just a little bit as well you mask do the same thing in the lower left corner darken that down here we are and again what we're doing is we're sort of attracting the viewers attention towards our couple in this case when we're done editing there I would click the close button and that would finish off our localized adjustments here with photo lab - now because I feel like I need to do that I'm going to open up the visa - from photo lab - you'll notice the interface looks exactly the same but again I don't know why I would even use the visa - if I'm launching from photo lab - because I have this more powerful capability of just using control points in this interface so for the sake of showing you I'm on this next image I'm gonna click on the Nik collection button that's in the lower right corner of the customize section this is going to lay out our Nik collection in alphabetical order I'm just going to go ahead and click on viv ASA - what's gonna happen is the the process is almost the same as if you're in Lightroom the raw file is going to be sort of set aside and duplicated and we're gonna get a tiff file that we'll be processing within the vaso - so we'll end up with two files here within our within our interface or raw interface but what you'll notice is that the software looks exactly the same as before I'm gonna minimize my GoToWebinar control panel and it works and operates exactly the same way so we can drop a point I want to make this a really dramatic image so I'm gonna darken down these shadows that are on the inside of the structure expand this out a little bit and then maybe add a little bit of contrast so another great shortcut that I didn't mention yet rather than having to move into the upper right corner and clicking the add control point every time I use the shortcut shift command a so that's shift command a on a Mac or shift control a if you're on a PC that gives you a crosshair so that you can add in a new control point very quickly and easily add some contrast a little bit of saturation in there there we go that's actually watch this as I add saturation it looks a little bit cool blueish in there so I'm gonna remove a little bit of blue and I'm gonna remove a little bit of green oops wrong way and that's gonna warm that back up in there and of course I can just kind of go around the image and distract you from the things I don't want you to look at and increase the color and saturation in the areas that I do want you to look and so on and so forth and this is going to create a an image that has hopefully more impact might drop a point in this shadow area watch what happens as I darken down just that shadow now I've got this really kind of eerie look and feel throughout the whole photo starting down that corner remove a little bit of saturation in the corner let's look at the before and after there's the original there's the enhanced and and this is like a general workflow that we've dealt with so we're we've looked at the interface we've talked about load about control points a little bit about levels and curves and we've covered basically everything that's within Vivi's a - and then it jumps back over into our photo lab - and this is this is gonna be a similar process for anyone who's a Lightroom user in your film strip at the bottom of the screen you'll have the original image and then right next to it of course this is dependent upon the settings that you've chosen within your raw processor but by default the duplicated image will be right next to the original raw file and it should be housed in the same folder physically as well so it's easy to find outside of the raw processing software alright ladies and gentlemen I think that's about everything I wanted to get into with the visa - so we're gonna transition into a QA I do want to just mention that until the end of June you it is basically $50 off of the going price so you can pick up the Nik collection to buy DxO for $99.99 USD as opposed to the one forty nine ninety-five which I believe is the normal full price all right so I'm gonna jump back into my GoToWebinar control panel and I'm gonna see if there are any questions here is there a link to a color effects Pro webinar Donald hopefully you're still here I believe there are well there might not be oh you did a few of my favorite photographers Rodney low both of them happened to be right Rodney's Rodney Smith and rather than Rodney Lough if they're there isn't any more color effects webinars this month Donald but next month I'll tell you what I I haven't actually created or I haven't created my list but I will send two DxO and then they will approve if they as long as they like it but Donald I will start out July with a color effects Pro webinar and my webinars have been Tuesdays and Thursdays I'm on the East Coast and I start them at 11:30 in the morning or 7 o'clock at night but the first webinar of July how about I make it a color effects Pro webinar and then I'll even we can end July with a color effects Pro webinar as well so there are none as of right now but that's because we already we already ran the color effects webinar for this month do you plan to explain how the Nik collection works with affinity Pro I don't have Lightroom or Photoshop Omar I actually am not familiar with affinity photo I'm gonna have to look that one up I'm assuming that is another post-processing photo tool I mean it definitely sounds like it it sounds familiar but I've never used it Omar if if affinity pro takes plug-ins the same way that Photoshop does it likely will work but I don't I don't have enough experience with considering it just barely rings a bell the name of that software so I don't know but Omar if you don't have Lightroom or Photoshop you actually get a photo lab two essentials for free when you purchase the Nik collection from DxO which is really pretty great so Maureen you said you bought and downloaded photo lab 2 but the new menu isn't showing so marine um I you might have the one previous version back so what you might need to do is update the software and so you would do that by going to the DxO website logging in and then you should be able to update your software and if that that should just work as far as i know i rep yell I feel joining from from Mexico cool I was gonna do a big shot photograph in Mexico and Mexico City at a large Museum I think it's called those Suzumiya Suzumiya so yeah I can't recall the exact name of it a great big beautiful structure right in a new Mecca or not New Mexico right in Mexico City but we weren't able to pull that off basically this Big Shot project that I work on is where we invite hundreds or a few thousand people to make a photograph at night where we paint with light to illuminate the building the next one that we're going to do the next big shot that we're going to be running will be in Albany the New York State Albany State Capitol building sometime next April and if you're not familiar you want to check that out it's a really cool project that we run at RIT it's called the RIT Big Shot check it out all right so the next question here need a stronger explanation of structure by the way also by the way also photo lab to elite so Donald I'm not following the second part of your question but the to explain structure let's go into this photo I'm gonna delete the layer that we just made and let's jump back over into the visa - I'll walk you through structure a little bit more so structure is a contrast / texture adjustment tool I'm gonna double click to zoom in to 100% just so we can kind of get a better feel for what this tool is doing and the structure slider if I increase the structure what's happening is it I can relate it kind of shoot what's the tool in Adobe Camera Raw wow I am at a complete and total loss for terms right now so there's a tool in Photoshop that as escaping me right now and it's ridiculous that it is because it's such a common tool in Adobe Camera Raw clarity goodness I couldn't remember the word clarity for some reason so I will relate the structure tool that's built in to color effects Pro - the clarity function in Adobe Camera Raw the the difference though is that it's not just mid-tone contrast if I drop this control point and I start adding structure the Nik collection when you open the software what it does is it figures out all the different objects and areas in the image so when you start placing the control points it can make those smarts elections and what structure wants to do is add or increase the little kind of like micro contrast texture in the photo or wherever you're placing that point so if you decrease structure it's going to decrease that texture if you increase the structure you're going to get more of that kind of texture to adjustment now the beauty of this of course is that texture is usually driven by quality and direction of light and the structure tool kind of throws that out the door and allows us to take something that has you know in direct sunlight on it so this is this is just a open shadow here and we can increase that texture so again it's another way of directing the viewers attention to these things that are important or maybe not so important by increasing texture and the areas that do want it in decreasing texture in the areas where you don't want it cool so Donald wonder if the circle could be applied to effect change of the whole sky yes so if you place the control point and increase the entire area to encompass an entire let's say sky the the selection of the control point is going to look for that blue or that tone color and texture that you've increased the point around Donald let me know if I've sort of filled in what control points are doing because I I went back to those as questions that it looks like you asked at the beginning of the webinar and I'm not sure if you know throughout the rest of the webinar I've explained that what you were looking for oh good questions michael said when when you show the mask of a control point I see banding so you see those little like step chart like there's there's hard-edged lines is what he's talking about and is that in the actual mask or is it a display that's not very accurate Michael it could be both of those things so it and it's it's going to be image dependent the the first image that we looked at was an 8-bit JPEG and there wasn't it wasn't a lot of information in there and we were adding a lot of contrast and so what could be happening as there was banding in that image as we were adding contrast in the control point picked up on that but if you're dealing with a high quality this is a I believe I know it's a 16-bit pretty sure it was a tiff file you're gonna get nice clean selections because there's gonna be plenty of data for these control points to work with in fact to kind of just drive that one home if you're going to be doing extensive post-processing on any image but especially with the NIC plugins I recommend using a 16 bit per channel image unless you're doing HDR and then it's 32 bit per channel but I I recommend working with a 16 bit per channel image the control points are going to be more powerful and smarter and then also the the end result is going to be much cleaner whether you're sending your image off for web viewing or if you're printing it or whatever you're doing and I think that the problem was it was a JPEG that we were dealing with or an 8 bit per channel file anyways great question okay so we answered that one is there a list of shortcuts for viv Asia Betty no I don't I don't think that there is an official list for any of your cuts with the Nick plugins back around 2011 there was actually a PDF that you could download but I don't think that that exists anymore I bet you if you went searching the you know through reddit or something like that you'd find a list but I I guess I should make like an unofficial list I don't know all of them but I do know most of them at least I think I know most of them would be cool to learn other ones as well but Wendy asked can you control the overall opacity of the control point well you you can't control the opacity of the control point in the way that it's making its selection Wendy but you can control the opacity and so much of the adjustments that you're making right so brightness at zero is 0% opacity you're not affecting it as you increase or decrease the adjustment it's going to be increasing the strength of it but Wendy in the software you you can't really affect the opacity of the point all you can do is add more control points and that's going to kind of control you know what's being affected and what's not right as I placed this point I start dragging it around you can see how they start to interact with each other the first point this control point is the ones this is the one that we're looking at the selection of and as I move this control point around you can see as the live selection changes Juris when decreasing brightness in the tool it seems to change the color like the Dodge burn tool that was in Photoshop back in the day are there any suggestions as to how to compensate for that yes good question juris so as you make a luminosity adjustment let's say with the vaso twos brightness what you're gonna want to do is go in and control color so the the drawback of that old tool within photoshop was that it didn't give you a a color adjustment tool like in the same thing right when you add dodge or burn with the old photoshop dodge burn tool it it did not so nice things to the color this has a similar initial adjustment but because you can control all aspects of color with each point it's not such a big deal and in fact I I kind of prefer that it gives us this kind of control because now I can go in and adjust blue or green and if it were automatic I wouldn't have as much control to be able to adjust that with hopefully that helps how do you increase or decrease the circle describing the area being affected you do that by changing the area itself so the slider that's parallel to the control point for there are no mathematicians in here saying that a point can't be parallel anyways if you drag that control point slider left or right you drag it away from the point it's gonna get bigger it's gonna make a larger selection drag it towards the actual point it's gonna make any smaller selection so Donald you say so using the Nick plug ins inside photolab - is that destructive or non destructive when used inside a program DxO photolab oh man Donald I don't I I don't want to get this question wrong so I'm gonna interpret it this way so you're saying if I'm using the Nick plugins with photolab - is it destructive or is it not so if you the the Nick plugins with any contemporary raw processor is technically non-destructive in so much as you can always go back to the original raw file if you're if you're in Lightroom and you're dealing with your raw information and you open up in to vevey so - from Lightroom a duplicate image is made so we're working in a non-destructive workflow in so much as you can go back to the original raw file right once you've made your adjustments to that duplicated TIFF file those things are kind of saved in set in stone you can't go back with that TIFF file you can only start over again with the raw file the beauty of using the the control points that are built into photo lab 2 is that it is completely a non-destructive process because you can always go back and get rid of or adjust those control points on the raw information and that's that's why I'm gravitating so quickly towards photo lab - is that I use these control points in you point technology every single day that I'm editing photos and now I can use them on my raw data it's unbelievable it's really pretty nice so Roman you said I know it's an topic but I'm just getting started with infrared so I'd really enjoy a session on how to process and friend Roman that's a cool one I'll float that to the DxO folk so the the only the problem that I would see is that it is very niche and we would probably only get a very low turnout for people interested in infrared doesn't mean we can't do it and it might be fun to just do one and then it gets recorded and then people can check it out afterwards as well so Rome and I'll float that one Andy has said great idea too DxO lab the NIC collection vaso why showing this if there's no reason to use the visa Oh so Andy I know I've lost a bunch of people thank you for sticking around for the Q&A by the way everyone I'm trying to just make my way through all of the questions so I'm Way up there this question was asked earlier so why would you use Vives a - if you've if you're processing your files from photo lab - I I don't think I would I I wouldn't use Boveda - if I'm in photo lab - because I have that capability but with the raw data I would use the rest of the plugins like color effects Pro for from photo lab - after I've done my you know overall light and color adjustment in photo lab - and my RAW processing but why am i showing it be it's because I I just thought I should show you how to launch the software from the photo lab - whether you're gonna use it at the vaso - or not I mean I just want to show you how to access it good question though very valid like why the heck would I do it if I wouldn't even use it well because I would use the rest of the NIC plugins and you do access the software that way are the Nick Nick - plugins still useful in photo lab - oh for sure yes so I'm gonna cancel here let's jump over into photo lab - so in photo lab - I'm finding myself using everything except for viv ASA - because the the software has control points built directly into it so what I would do is like on this image I would crop the photo I would adjust my white balance make sure my optical correction is on place my control points where I wanted to dodge and burn and then from there I might convert this image to black and white so from there I would go into the Nik collection click on silver effects Pro - and then okay and then I would convert this image from color to black and white so in this way now I can basically deal with one RAW processing software that has control point capability you point technology and also the rest of the NIC plugins maybe I'll go into my invoke presets these are the ten presets that I developed over the past few months and they have this really nice result they're there mind you I've jumped over into silver effects Pro - sorry if I create any confusion if anyone walked away and I'm converting this file from color to black and white these are the 10 presets that are now built into silver effects Pro 2 called invoke and it's a really fun set of presets that look different than the original 38 presets that were built in so let's say I like more silver but I want to go into brightness let's darken down the brightness a little bit with dynamic brightness reduce some contrast and dark and the whole thing and then say okay I'm happy with that click the Save button and now that's more of the kind of normal workflow that I would be dealing with with photolab - that is doing the raw processing my computer is doing that I would be doing the raw processing in photo lab 2 and then using something like color effects Pro or silver effects to massage the image all right how can I copy you points in photo lab whew looks as far as I know the control points in photo lab can be copied basically the same way let's look so I jumped into my local adjustments I've got my control point if I want to copy that one if I hold nope option doesn't do it if I click on it and then I hit command C command V that isn't doing it either a good question so I've got my point I'm gonna right click that doesn't do me any good you know there must be a way of duplicating these control points I know if I want to get the exact same effect like in his hair I can place that here and this control point is going to be a duplicate this point basically just by clicking somewhere but it is acts entirely as a duplicate meaning I can't make adjustments to this point I have to basically make a new control point if I wanted to do something different than an exact duplicate but the the way that you make a duplicate that stays exactly the same is you literally just click on the point that you want to duplicate of and then you click somewhere else and it's going to make a duplicated control point a set of adjustments except with its new selection based upon that area of influence let me know if that that made sense that was a probably a weird explanation will Nick to work with TIF files yes absolutely the TIF files shouldn't have any problem Walter any chance of extending capability back to OS 10 point eleven El Capitan I don't know Walter that's a good question I don't I don't as far as I know most software companies you know don't actively make things backwards compatible if if the software existed in that era and in that you know operating system usually will continue to work in that operating system but Walter I can't say that for sure because I don't I don't actually work for DxO I swept in ours to Train on the Nick plugins so I don't have a good answer for that one I do apologize that one you you're better off reaching out to DxO and asking about that which I know it feels like you are by asking in this webinar but I'm I'm actually a professor of photography and I do the webinars as a service to DxO and the public in because I like talking about the software it's one time can Adobe Camera Raw read changes done in DxO photo lab that's a good question as well the I do know that DxO photo labs - makes a sidecar XMP file I don't know how much of that XMP file Adobe Camera Raw can read so I had a question about the recordings the the recording of this webinar which we're still recording this so you couldn't hear this part if you stick around very end of that will be emailed to you based upon the email address that you signed up for the webinar so you'll as long as you signed up with a real email address it'll get emailed to you tomorrow after 24 hours I believe mark could you send links to other video trainings and other products tell me the agenda for other webinars so mark next month I haven't actually planned the agenda right now I'm thinking we start with the color effects pro webinar maybe I mean I will absolutely float the idea and maybe we can do an infrared photography a jet like post-processing webinar using I would say photo lab 2 and then also I like to use color effects and silver effects Pro in sharpener Pro with my infrared images as well I'll do enough but there's no oh oh and if you're interested in other videos go to youtube and if you literally just search on youtube Nik collection there is an official DxO Nik collection page and you've got like hours and hours and hours of old webinars of old videos and of stuff that Brian Matisse should have recorded or me or Laurie Rubin or all of the old Nik software folk they're all up there is there a chance to get much better price of the Nik collection I've been using them since a long time and we only need to update refu all good question I I believe that the the option is to kind of re up at 9999 III that's another one that's sort of like out of my realm at this point I do know that the the deal that you can get now so it's normally gonna be a hundred and fifty until the end of June because if it's a launch pricing is $99.99 I don't know much else aside from that I'm sorry I feel Thank You Omar be a photo lab to webinar showing the difference between essential and full version I'm interested in Prime noise reduction feature and one another's period enlightenment good question as well Michael I'm not currently conducting webinars on photo lab - I I would be hesitant to do that because I don't know every single in and out I do know if you want to know the differences between essentials and the the elite version there's actually a document and if you literally go to Google and say what is the difference between photo lab two essentials and elite a document will basically pop up you'll have to go to the faq page but an FAQ page will pop up with that information specifically can you access Nick through affinity or and add it manually yeah Stefan Stefan I'm not sure yes Museo Soumaya I'm probably saying that wrong Raphael but that was the museum that we were going to do an RIT big shot of that would have been really fun it's a beautiful building and it really uncool we would have basically had to light the neighboring buildings to illuminate the the museum itself would have been really neat is clipping warning built into the visa no Felix there is no clipping warning built into the visa - that that feature in the NIC plugins wasn't integrated until I believe HDR effects Pro and on so HDR FX Pro color effects silver effects and analog effects Pro all have clipping warnings but I don't believe the visa has it Michael thank you you mentioned clarity see I'm just now getting to those comments Stefan just said update for 59.99 sign into the DxO account for this good okay so the I can't remember who asked but if you have an old version of the NIC plugins and it's registered it looks as though you can sign into DX owes account and then update for 59.99 I'm I'm getting this from another probably very valid source Steven thank you for mentioning that but I can't say that that's an official thing because I'm entirely sure thank you how do you find future webinars such as the color effects Pro webinar that I just mentioned those are going to be posted in the next few weeks I have to send EXO my proposed list and then EXO will basically post those as soon as they've okayed all of them uh how do I get the start of the Nick collection to come up in the Photoshop startup Gerry good question let me minimize DxO here so if if this Nick selective tool isn't popping up Gerry what you would do is go to the file drop down menu go to automate and then under automate you click on the Nik collection selective tool and that's gonna populate the Nik collection selective tool click on that pops up voila if you've edited a file in Adobe raw and then opened the file into photo lab - am i starting with an edited file from adobe raw another valid question I Douglas as far as I know you're gonna be starting over with the photo lab - I don't I'm not a hundred percent sure on this but I'm pretty sure that the XMP file that Adobe raw writes is not going to be read by photo lab - maybe somebody who's more versed in that can tell you though I I haven't tried that yet because what I've been doing is taking files that I haven't actually been processing with Adobe Camera Raw and bringing them into photo lab so I haven't looked for that at this point if that that makes sense is the control point a preferred tool over the adjustment brush marine I much prefer it but that's that is completely subjective totally subjective as to what kind of controls you like to work with some people much prefer just a brush but there is the edge detection brush there's a gradient tool and there's the control points that are built into photo lab - and I I find myself using all of them I tend to think with control points first and then I will move into gradients and then I will clean things up using brushes that's that tends to be my my process our past webinars online yes David all of the webinars that we've done are not online we used to actually do three webinars a day five days a week that would be way too many webinars to have to you know go through but there are numerous webinars that you can you can watch on YouTube is there a way you can come down and present photolab - to my photography club oh well Donald maybe I I'd love to I do visit photography clubs around western New York I go to Buffalo in Canandaigua I've been to Vermont a couple times since moving back to New York I used to do it all over the country but that was when Nick would pay to do that Donald where is your photo club and mark you said I need to go could you email me okay I'm mark I'm not gonna be able to email you that but basically all of this information is available and you will get an email I think mark you might have already left but you will get an email tomorrow with this information with the new sorry with this webinar recorded I should say it that way notice answer an increase decrease have you been working images Robert I'm not sure the I'm sorry photolab to only interact with lightroom no Betty you can use photo lab to as a total standalone piece of software RAW processing tool and in image sort of organization tool and then you can also match that and play with Photoshop right so I actually do send images from photo lab to over into Photoshop so that I can use layers and layer masks when necessary good question boy we've got a lot of good questions today Nik shortcuts ah Kevin so Kevin found a link to this page here let me see if I can send this out to everybody let's I'm gonna open up a chrome cool there it is Kevin thank you so much I'm gonna send this link out to everybody and I'm gonna send it to so this should show up in everybody's questions box there that link brings you to the Nik collection shortcuts page Kevin great work thank you umm okay cool hey Mike good to see ya Mike that's great mike is also interested in an infrared webinar all right we've got two so far um we got that Kevin thank you for posting that another spot just in another spot for the new control point I'm not some of the comments I'm not following completely it was probably referencing old questions and and so I'm not I've already lost the context cool alright GoToMeeting excellent today got it thanks Marvin go IR we got three people interested in the infrared talk cool all right Gerald you said affinity Pro plugin okay so let me send this out to everybody as well because apparently you can use the Nik collection in affinity Pro so that'll send to everybody so there are two links in your questions box you're an affinity user use the second one if you want to get the keyboard shortcuts use the first one so rum and you said one more ir question have you shot ir in places like Iceland and Greenland or Arctic locations Roman I have not that that would be there are two photographers who I can think of Wow and one of them already escapes me Vincent Versace is one so if you look up Vincent Versace photography he's an icon ambassador and he shoots infrared all around the world and so if you have specific questions about that you can probably contact him through his website Vincent Versace and then um shoot there's another photographer who I can't remember his name but he posts on Facebook all the time with his infrared images I just can't remember who that is cool Donald you're in Peekskill is that Donald is that near Albany I don't know Peekskill but I know there's a lot of you know kills around the Albany area around the central New York in Blair made a good point here before you update the software make sure that you backup your presets so copy all presets that you've created your custom presets save them somewhere on your computer and then when you update it you you don't run the risk of losing them cool Mike I would love to join the Twin Cities Photo Club there for another night that would be great infrared - Wow I got a lot of people who are interested in that Rick is also in in the infrared in webinar wait yeah look at this everybody's interested this is wonderful cool well this gives me an excuse to go out and shoot more infrared work as well um you're about a half an hour from Albany near West Point Donald actually West Point is another place where we would absolutely love to do a an RIT big shot I can imagine a couple of different views because those are really beautiful interesting buildings and you can layer some cool architectural work there yeah Donald we should chat about that Donald in fact my RIT email address if you're interested in emailing me I don't have questions or I can I don't know the answers for every single thing mind you but I'll gladly try and answer any questions you might have if you guys want to email me at da h PP H so it's da papa da HP pH at RIT edu I would love to come and see you guys in the Camera Club and do a talk for is that that sounds really fun and if you have questions in regards to other things no problem I'll try and answer those as well Tony no problem thank you very much I'm glad you joined us today I don't see any more Oh yep ray said can you show the gradient tool yep let me show you how to the gradient tool works within a photo lab here welcome thank you for joining I'm glad that that was helpful and useful and a good time okay so the gradient tool within um photo lab I got to minimize my GoToWebinar panel here so let's see let's go to an image where maybe I would use that let's show this one so here we've got another photo there's all sorts of things that we would do to this image to make it pop to bring out texture to you know well make it so that we could see the rainbows here but what we might want to do is add a gradient maybe from the upper right corner to see we can get a little bit of texture out of that area so I'll right click mind you we're in photo lab - I'm in my customized section and I've clicked on local adjustments so just so you know you got to click on the local adjustments first right click go to the gradient filter and then you literally just just like a gradient filter let's say within Lightroom click and drag out the adjustment area that you want to control and then you can go into your exposure right or into let's say the clearview+ and into micro contrast and all of the different controls that you have and we can really start to hone in this is not the best example add a little bit of contrast let's go into color you know what would happen if we went into sharpness so now we're getting a little bit more texture out of that area using this gradient tool if we ever need to do a just the gradient tool we would just go to one of the points or pins and we can go in and you know adjust the shape the tilts and gradient of the actual tool itself it works in a very similar way to the Lightroom gradient tool if you're familiar with that one Ken one group control points in photo lab David that's a good question I'm not sure on that one let's see I mean there there might be a way and I might not be able to just figure it out intuitively but let's say we do a new mask wow my computer is going crazy now the fan just kicked on control point let's place one here and then um well actually I technically David these three control points are grouped meaning like as soon as I drop the point so here's what I did delete these points let's start over okay so if I add a new control point and I just place it down here if I make an adjustment so let's brighten this up and add a little bit of Clear View and a little bit of micro contrast and contrast so let's say we like that effect we can do a couple things you can expand that area to the entire image but that runs the risk of affecting areas that maybe we don't want to affect the other option is to literally when you're on your point just click and drop the next point on the area that you want to adjust and this will actually act as a duplicate slash a group and that if I adjust I'm just gonna add one here as well if I adjust these sliders it's going to affect all of those points so they you you don't hit G or command G to group them they actually automatically work in a group thunk ssin allottee David and then if you don't want that to happen you would just delete that control point and place a new mask point on the area that you want to adjust all right okay ladies and gentlemen we've gone way over on time here about a half an hour I greatly appreciate everybody sticking around during the Q&A hopefully you had a good time please come back and see us Joseph Flynn Ashby is running webinars till the end of the month as well as July and August and hopefully on past that and I will be as well I'm gonna try and start July off with a color effects webinar and I'm gonna put a collection of images together and talk for infrared photography at some point but there will be other webinars as well silver effects analog effects Pro and so on and so forth Ruben if you want to rewatch this webinar it's got to get processed and then it will actually automatically get sent to your email address that you signed up to this webinar for so you'll get an email I think 24 hours from now thanks a lot ladies and gentlemen have a really great day and hopefully I'll see you again soon thanks Michael [Music] [Music]

Channel: Nik Collection

Views: 4,188

Keywords: Viveza, Nik collection by DxO, DxO Labs, Webinar, Dan Hugues, Nik Collection, Niksoftware

Id: H5AcrViWKxQ

Length: 90min 8sec (5408 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 25 2019