Getting the Most Detail & Color in Your Urban Photography with Nik Viveza

[Music] we are going to be looking at viveza today through the lens of launching from dxo photo lab four uh now the way that you launch the software doesn't really affect how the interface looks and the general use of the software so if you say okay well i've never used photo lab before so this doesn't work for me that's not the case viveza looks and works basically exactly the same way from photo lab 4 as it would from adobe lightroom from other pieces of software it's a little bit different from photoshop but um you know i'll try and hit upon those things as they pop up anyways you are going to want to utilize your raw processing software um you know a lot of times people will utilize their color temperature and adjust their brightness and their contrast and tones within their raw processor you can do a lot of that right within viveza as well and you'll get a different look out of the effect with viveza as well so that's that's what we're gonna sort of start with um you know i've got i kind of focused on some um times of day where you know getting a lot of color out of different things is a little bit more challenging in this case you know in most of these nighttime images it's because of the the numerous illuminates the different ways um that that light is illuminating your exposure right so these nighttime images there's a bunch of different color temperature light sources and therefore it's harder to control the image so that's that's kind of where i came from when choosing our images here for the most part anyways so um first things first we're in photo lab we want to launch viveza which is our light and color editing tool so to do that from photo lab 4 you move into the lower right corner of the interface here and click on the nik collection now i mess around with my settings a lot because depending upon which software i'm using and what i'm using it for i actually change these settings and if you're launching the software from a different piece of you know different host software from adobe lightroom or adobe photoshop um these settings are kind of built into the host software that that'll make more sense when i click on this so if you're launching from photo lab 4 it's a good idea to check these settings especially if you're adjusting them from time to time but if you're a lightroom or adobe photoshop user it's a little bit different you would adjust how you how your plugins interact with lightroom or photoshop anyways long story short i click on that settings button and i'm going to make sure that my action is exported as a tiff i also like to deal with a 16 bit file format it's a larger file format but there's so much more information that is totally worth it especially if i'm going to be really changing my image and dodging and burning and affecting color and so on so the 16-bit option is a really good one um i don't have to worry too much about resolution and i'm not resizing so i'm not going to turn that little checkbox on so that'll stay the same i'm not going to watermark and my icc profile's fine for what we're doing i just kind of wanted to check these before i launched into viveza and had some potential problem because you know i was resizing the image to be 10 of the original or something like that we wouldn't want that it wouldn't work okay all of these settings look good we're going to click the ok button and then we have to choose the nik plugin that we want to utilize in this case we're talking about viveza so let's click on viveza as the software launches what's going to happen from photo lab also from lightroom adobe lightroom because we're dealing with our raw files the a separate tiff file is going to be created and viveza launches that separate tiff file one of the benefits of working with a tiff file format from photo lab or adobe lightroom is that you can work in this relatively new non-destructive process now i need to kind of pause here for just a second these little tool prompts that pop up there they're like little warning prompts that are letting us know that certain things are going to happen when we continue on this one is telling us that because we're on a tiff file we can actually use this non-destructive um file format or processing um making sure that this checkbox is on oops it's not gonna let me turn it off right now but it's on right now um in this little indicator just saying that it's on well once you know that that's what this says you can actually click the do not show again and this isn't going to pop up until you update your software or re-download and install again or anything like that so i say that because these prompts are going to keep popping up during the webinar and i let that happen because i want you to see them um in case this is like the first time you've ever launched the software so that might get annoying and i'll show you where that becomes a little bit annoying once you know what the prompt is saying but anyways we're on a tiff file we have this non-destructive edit capability that's on and that allows us to make our adjustments to our image and then click the apply button and save the image and then we can open this exact photograph back up and reprocess the image we can pick up where we left off if you will we can move control points around we can change the preset that we're using and so on and so forth so it's a really nice feature um if you ever think you're going to need to reprocess the image just turn it on and it does make a slightly larger tip file but it's not going to be substantially larger because tip files are already pretty good size in terms of how much space they take up on your hard drive long story short we're working in this non-destructive process all right here we are we are in viveza3 and uh what i want to sort of bring you over to the left side for is to talk about these presets right this is a brand new option within the newest version of evasa and uh there are several presets that are built into the software and then you have the ability to create your own presets so the presets that are built in are under the all section nine of them are in vogue and really what you've got is neutral so this top one here is just um the the original state of your image when you launch it it's neutral it's no adjustment done with the vasa but if we go and click on one of these other presets like the golden hour uh what's going to happen when we click on it is we're going to get another one of those little warnings and that's just saying are you sure you want to use this preset because what this preset does is it adjusts all of the tools sliders or whatever tool sliders apply to that preset anyways on the right side so when i click this yes button you're going to see two things happen the image is going to change and the tools palette on the right side is also going to change so we're going to click yes voila all right that's golden hour and the idea here is that the image goes from you know this normal daylight photograph that was shot probably around noon or so i don't think that metadata is in there nope anyways um and it makes it seem like it was shot during the golden hour of sunrise or sunset right and that's the function and it's really nice because you click one button tell the software yeah it's okay if you apply that preset and you're good to go right and what it's doing is it's adjusting the brightness and the shadows the highlights here it's warming the image a little bit it looks like or changing the hue just a little bit and that is the golden hour preset well there are 10 total presets that are built in and they all create a different look every time i click on the preset i'm going to get one of those warnings saying are you sure you know that you want that to apply this is where you'd probably want to click yeah don't show again i know what's going to happen when i click that ok button or that yes button or click on the preset oops i punched my microphone sorry about that so i'm just going to click yes and now we have blue hour right go from gold hour to blue hour you know we can go into darken and it's a whole other set of adjustments going into the image and you know these do a couple really great things they show you some different potential outcomes using the software this is high contrast by the way uh and they work really well as uh starting points so you know i i don't know if i've ever just sort of clicked on tonal adjust and left it if it were doing exactly what we were interested in the image looking like with one single click awesome totally great that's a perfect preset and that's all you gotta do oftentimes these built-in presets i'm clicking on them and then i'm moving over into the tools palette and i'm kind of making my adjustments to augment the image to get exactly what i want out of the photograph right so with just a couple clicks i i use tonal adjustment i made a few little of adjustments here we're going to talk a little bit more about presets but i want to just show you what's happening if you follow my cursor into the sort of middle top chord quadrant here if i press and hold this compare button you're going to see the original image and as i let go of the compare button you'll see our enhanced image right so that's just clicking on the preset and then sliding a couple sliders around we're going to go a lot more in depth than that but that's the before and the after there's two other ways of viewing before and after let's just look at them now we'll talk about them but let's just look at them um the next one to the right of the sort of once um you know the press and hold compare the before and the after um we have a split preview so when we click on that in the top sort of center quadrant cuts the image down the middle on the left is the original image and on the right is our enhanced image if you click on that little line you can drag it back and forth and you can kind of get a good idea of exactly what's happening in a given portion of the photograph for example you know if you look at the original sort of detailing in the top part of the image here in the original raw file it's a little bit muted because of the flare and the light and the way that it's working well using this preset is really kind of bringing those textures out nicely it's relatively subtle but it's a nice little you know massage of tones to get exactly what you might want and this is just an easy way of of looking at it and actually getting a good view as to what's happening you can also rotate that split preview so if you click on the button right underneath the little center line it splits it um horizontally instead of the vertically um and you can you know drag that up and down instead of left and right nice little option the last feature for the before and afters or the compares is a side by side preview on top is the original now on the bottom is the enhanced if you have a portrait-oriented image an image that's taller than it is wide you can click on this little spin button or twirler and it will twirl it so that on the left you've got the original and on the right you have the enhance it just depends on how you want to view the image one other nice little trick if you tap the tab key on your keyboard this is this is actually a common shortcut in a lot of pieces of software so you try this and you're in lightroom or in photo lab tap tab and it hides those tools palette on the left and on the right so you can get a really nice sense of your image with a little bit more real estate on your monitor uh really nice especially if you're working with like a laptop screen all right so i tapped the tab button again we're going to go back to our single image view by just clicking on that compare button and let's go back over to the left side let's finish up with these presets i haven't shown you how to make a preset yet but i want to show you some of just my random custom presets that i've created for various reasons right and uh the way that i got into that if you notice there's this little uh like triangle little carrot uh when that's open you're gonna see all of those presets if i click on the word custom or if i move into the carrot down here i click on that and now my custom section is open and these are just random presets that i've created for different purposes so this is a nice little high key recipe or or preset just gives us a bright overall image right sort of shifts the histogram over to the right um and that's relatively subtle whereas the color ir preset that i've created which is not real it's it's just a you know a farcical representation of color infrared but it's interesting it actually looks really cool on images with foliage there's some cool stuff that happens because of the way that this is generating its look right now it basically just turns the whole image purple but let's let's talk about how these things are working right let's talk about how we can take an image from you know a regular looking photograph and massage the tones or really augment the the colors and change to something like that um color ir image using viveza so i'm going to click on the high key we're just going to go ahead and click the apply button and we're going to move into the next image because it's been about 17 minutes and we don't need to look at this photograph any longer let's click apply in the lower right corner i click the apply button that's going to bring us back over into our host software and in our host software we will have our original raw file and our duplicated tiff file with the nik plugin applied to it with in this case evasa applied to it and in this case i used the high key preset that i had created all right so let's keep moving let's go to this photograph right you know what no let's go to this photograph we'll come back to that one because i want to talk to you about control points um i do i definitely want to show you how to save a recipe i keep calling them that they're called presets i want to show you how to save presets here with the vasa but for now let's jump into this image we'll go to the nik collection button in the lower right let's click on viveza3 software is going to launch we might start with a preset on the left hand side and then you know dive into the tools palette i think in this case though we'll just dive right into the tools palette we'll do some global adjustments to the image affecting the whole photograph and then we'll take a look at what control points can do here within viveza to help us to dodge and burn or um direct to the viewer's attention through the photograph and so on and so forth right okay so that that little prompt comes up i'm going to click ok i'm going to go ahead and hide our presets for now just to give our image a little bit more real estate to do that you just click on the little triangle it's very tiny on my screen right now i apologize if it's hard to see but if you just click on that little triangle on the left side it's on the right side of the presets you know interface but it's on the left side of the screen yeah all right so our image has a little bit more real estate so that we can kind of see what's happening right now i'm in the fit to screen view but if i click fill screen it's just going to fill in all of that interface that we have available to us and then a navigator is going to come up and we can kind of navigate through this image i can just kind of move up and down a little bit because of the way the fill screen is working but if we wanted to zoom all the way in or or zoom to a different percentage or ratio you can click this one to one button to zoom into 100 resolution and then you can kind of use the navigator to look around uh or and if you're a fan of shortcuts if you just press and hold the space bar that's not working for me for some reason if you press and hold the space bar you should actually be able to kind of scroll around the image i don't know why i just zoomed out like that on me that was weird all right so press and hold the space bar it gives you the hand tool and you can kind of move around like that back up into the top portion there's one more uh sort of zoom that you can work with here within the interface mine's set to two to one so that's going to zoom us into 200 resolution so you know really really far zoomed in um but if you click on these little arrows here you can actually choose different ratios as well you know 50 33 and 25 and so on and so forth so get half resolution and so on i'm going to keep this set to fit to screen for now but i wanted to make sure to cover those things before i jump into the details of the tools palette over here on the right side let's go ahead and do that though so on the far right side you do have a loop function and this loop function kind of follows your cursor around mine was closed a minute ago i just opened it up but it follows your cursor around and if if you move your mouse and your cursor you can just see what is within your loop at 100 so it's zoomed in for you so you can kind of get a sense of you know how bright or how dark those different tones are that's your loop tool your histogram is a live histogram it displays rgb by default so it has your red green and blue channels basically and also technically your luminosity channel as well as sort of built in here as a visualization this allows to show you you know predominantly your shadow tones on the left here we move into our mid-tones and our highlights over here on the right and then you can toggle between your different channels should that be helpful and your luminance or luminosity channel handy to have uh there's also a little indicator system so um and this this is commonplace for a lot of pieces of software at this point this is really nice way of viewing um if you have any shadow detail that's blocked up that's just black with no detail that is going to be showing up with this blue indicator and then the same thing happens with highlights that are blown out if i click on this we get a little green indicator in this case that displays any highlights that are totally blown out which they're not really blown out in the green channel it looks like um because those areas have nice detail actually um all right so moving underneath our histogram these are our global adjustments right so from brightness down to hue and then through highlights mid-tones shadows and blacks and also the white balance tool which i'm going to show you on a different image these sliders adjust whatever those particular sort of fields are based upon the value of the slider so what that means in english is if i take my brightness slider to the right or to the left you're going to see that happening you're going to see this this heads-up change as you slide to the left and to the right right and and some of these are self-explanatory brightness is relatively self-explanatory you slide that to why isn't that working um you slide brightness to the left it's going to darken the image slide it to the right it's going to brighten the image my double click isn't working for some reason usually what you can do is double click on a slider and it will get it back to its home which is its default but for some reason my i might have a problem with my software anyways i'll just slide it back to zero so brightness contrast saturation um saturation is like the volume of the color turn that up into the right right this is you know this is how you get the most color out of your image but that doesn't always look right so we're not always going to just take our saturation up into the right a lot of times what we're going to do is we're going to use that saturation slider maybe globally but then we're also going to go in with control points selectively decide where to brighten and where to add color and where to remove color from this is going to help us to direct the viewer's attention through our image so that you know maybe you don't have to stick with the original lighting of the photograph to direct the viewer you have a nice composition with a good exposure and then you redirect the viewer's attention by using these controls within viveza now structure i do want to just talk a little bit about the structure tool structure is basically a texture enhancement if you slide it to the right it increases that texture really nicely if you slide it to the left it reduces the texture it's not making up information this is just a very specific smart tool that goes into these little areas and objects and adds micro contrast or or object specific kinds of contrast which translates as texture if you add it in you're getting more of it if you slide it to the left you are removing it shadows warmth red green blue and hue we're going to focus on red green blue and hue in a couple minutes but we're going to do it selectively in fact i don't find myself using red green blue or hue in a in a global manner very often with my digital workflow but what these sliders do is they allow you to increase or decrease the amount of red um green and blue and in fact if you if you remove red technically what we're doing is we are adding cyan right so by removing red we're adding cyan with green if we are removing green we're technically adding magenta right so you can see that happening um if we if we add green we are both adding green and we are removing magenta so um if if you have a little bit of um comfort with sort of the color wheel uh and how that works these sliders will translate and they give you a ton of control now in my mind these sliders the ones that are global aren't all that helpful but as i slide my blue slider to the right i realize that the sky could go a little bit more blue and it looks really pretty when it's a little bit more blue but the rest of the image not so much it sort of cools the whole photograph down and that's not really effective for this photo it kind of just looks like we had the wrong color balance or something so um let's let's make some local adjustments let's use these control points to really get more control out of our color we're going to come back to these selective tones on a different photograph but for now let's let's go ahead and hide the global adjustments so i'm going to click on that little carrot that's to the right of the global adjustments label just going to hide it this gives us a little bit more space for our control points and what we're going to do is click the control point button this button right here allows us to add a control point and um in terms of like the way that i go about thinking about processing a photograph is i i try to do the global massive things first right so you do the big changes first and then you start to micromanage if you will you you go global and you make your way down to the very specific areas in the image to kind of direct the viewers attention to add detail or bring out detail in certain areas and remove detail in other areas again to help to direct the viewers attention through the photograph in this case on my screen there is just a little bit of detail in these trees here and that's great in terms of you know like having these nice beautiful leading lines that move us through the image it works well to not have anything terribly distracting back here but i want some texture so what we're going to do is click that control point button on the right side our cursor is going to turn into this little dot thing and the little dot is going to allow us to just click on an object and drop a point now when i drop that point i'm able to size my area of influence and what's happening here is the control point is going to make a selection for us right so it is a targeted adjustment and when we make our adjustment to with our sliders with these sliders over here on the right side to that one control point it's going to be affecting whatever is being masked by this control point whatever's being selected by this control point to know what's being selected by this control point there you've got a couple options first of all the general technique in my mind is to kind of encompass the object that you want to adjust inside of that circle it's okay if the circle encompasses some of these other areas because the control point can kind of figure out that this is the you know the woods back here it is a particular tone color texture the control point can recognize the edges and the lines here so basically it just instantly makes its selection we can kind of figure out how much of the selection we want based upon the size of the area of influence that's that circle that goes around the point and then if you ever just want to see the selection that the control point is making you can also do that so if you follow my cursor over to the right side of the interface now that we've added a control point we have one control point in what's called our control point list and you can actually rename these as well so if i double click on control point 1 and i just name name it like wooded hill right or trees or whatever you want to name it that is going to allow me to kind of know a little bit better as to what's happening what is being selected and which control points which uh now to know exactly what the control point is selecting follow my cursor over to this little box it's a little kind of grayed out box with a circle in it if you click on it the mask of the control point is sort of illuminated if you will what the control point is doing is making this instant selection for us and if you click on the control point you start moving it around you can get a sense of what the selection is and in fact anything that's white is being selected by this control point anything that's completely blacked out like this is not being affected by this control point and then anything that is gray is being affected a certain amount the lighter the gray the more this control point will affect the image right now oftentimes i'm i don't even use this feature it's nice to have i like to check it out from time to time i wouldn't get too bent up on on using it all that often because i don't think you really need it because rather than worrying about where the selection is what you should what i think folks should worry about a little bit more uh is what happens when you adjust your sliders right so if i take my brightness slider and i start bringing texture and detail back into those trees and opening them up sure it is opening up some of the details down in here as well but that actually looks photographic it looks like the exposure actually would have worked that way so i don't mind that the control point is actually um you know making the selection of the thing and then also maybe affecting some of these other areas a little bit um there is a way to fix that though there's two ways to actually fix that as i what i just did was i just took my brightness slider for the control point i brighten it up we're not going to leave it at this brightness or this density level i just did that so we can get some sort of visual as to what's happening i want to show you how to hone in our selection a little bit more because we've got this one massive control point let's look at the selection so we'll go back into the control points list if you follow my cursor to the right side uh click on that little box one more time and check this out there's i'm gonna call i'm gonna say there's three ways technically maybe four ways of of really honing in the selection first of all depending upon the size of the area of influence you get a different selection right so if i leave my area that like this small it's going to make a circular adjustment because the selection is basically in that circle so what i always want to do is i want to make sure that i've sort of delineated my edge nicely by starting to increase the size of the area of influence by just increasing the size of the point and that way our area of influence is going to be affecting in this area and you can see there's this really nice photographic looking kind of edged tone line to it even goes and finds these individual light bulbs make sure that the selection is where we want it to be um the next way of controlling the selection is deciding where you place the control point right because if i place it up here i'm getting a different selection and then therefore adjustment than if i place it down here and then the other two ways of controlling well two of the other ways of controlling what the selection is is doing is if you follow over here to the right side of the interface this luminance slider and chrominance slider um this is going to give us these are new by the way for for folks who um are brand new to viveza everything's new here but for folks who've used the previous version of aveza these are new controls for honing in your selection um and they allow you to decide how um sort of wide your radius is going to be from sorry let me rephrase that the luminance slider if i slide it to the right it becomes um uh less sort of liberal with what it's actually selecting right it's it's honing in its selection based upon the brightness based upon the luminance of that area right so the further to the right i slide this the the less area i'm having the control point select not area necessarily but deviations or differences from the value that we've placed the point on right so this is going to make it a little bit more precise if i slide the luminance to the right i'm going to if i want to broaden out my selection i can slide that luminance slider to the left and that is changing the way that the control point thinks about its selection if a control point could think um chrominance it does the same thing but it pertains to or controls um its selection based upon the color value instead of the brightness value so chrominance here if i slide that to the right now i'm honing in my selection based upon color if i slide it to the left now i'm broadening out my selection based upon color and what's beautiful about this is that you can kind of find this happy medium where you know maybe chrominance at 66 percent and my luminance at like 26 works really well to give us the adjustment that we want the thing is is i'm viewing the actual selection right now and in my mind it makes more sense to kind of be viewing what's happening when i slide chrominance or luminance around when i'm actually viewing the image with the control point that has some kind of adjustment on it right because that actually indicates to me what's being selected and what's not and how fine that selection is so control points are really really wonderful and convenient because most of the time you can just go place the point on the object that you want to adjust and take these sliders and adjust them but if you need to be more precise than that you can go and be more precise by changing the area of influence the size controlling and affecting the luminance and prominence slider and then also the other way to get more specific or a better selection is by adding more control points right the the more control points that i add the smarter each control point gets and what what i mean by that and i know i'm spending a lot of time on control points but um this is one of the major facets of the vasa and it's it's one of the ways that you can get the most control out of your color or luminosity and really just over the image itself to be able to dodge and burn and attract the viewers attention through the image you know right now i'm just sort of sliding this control point around it has a brightness and a contrast adjustment and i actually kind of like what's happening when i park it right up in here in the right tone it kind of brightens up those values just a little bit and it draws my attention down into that area because of the contrast between the yellow here and the blue and the darker tones down there anyways um control points so if i want to make this control point smarter i can add more control points right in fact if we just click the control point button here and i go and drop this control point basically right next to that one watch what happens to the tones around it you see how that changed this wasn't that's not like a really good decision to make but these control points are now interacting with each other and they're wanting to make basically the same selection because it's on the same color and tone and texture but if i just drag this off to the side for now and then maybe we go and turn that selection back on we'll go to the wooded hill selection back over here to the right turn that on if i go and drag this down and i place this like in these shadow areas that's going to hone our selection for us so control point number three is going to be affecting that area and the first control point is not going to be adjusting these tones anymore and i know that because if if i drag this away well you can't really see that value change let's brighten this way up and i'm going to increase the size of this right and now this the adjustment is way too far but you can see how this control point is brightening up these values in this section as well if i drag this guy over you can actually see that adjustment kind of disappear right so this i would call a constricting control point and what it's doing is it's making sure that this massive big control point over here that's really adjusting a lot of the image is not affecting the area where i i don't want it affected that makes any sense all right so that is control points in a nutshell uh what i'm doing now is i've brightened up this area and i've added a little bit of structure let's talk about how to kind of meander through this image um you know we've got this strong foreground element here um with these the string of lights with what i assume is a temple here on the right side um you know moving off into the left i love the color combination the color contrast that we have here and we can kind of exaggerate that even more um before we do that though i'm going to kind of make some corrective things happen right like in this image some of the characters on the hindu temple over here um are are changing color it looks like some of it's red some of it's white and you know i some of that might be of you know some kind of cultural significance that i'm not knowing or understanding but photographically um i want those to be the same right so that this these tones are not jutting out from on the edge of that i want them to all kind of be red so what we're going to do is use a control point and another really cool feature that we've yet to talk about yet built into control points so i'm going to click this control point button i'm going to go ahead and just drop the control point let's drop it right in the middle of this character and then i'm gonna i'm gonna zoom in let's go one to two let's move over and what we're gonna do here is we're gonna go ahead and um shrink the control point down and we're going to change the color by using this color picker over here on the right side so um on the color picker how do i describe this so we're in the selective adjustments we're in the color picker and what i want to do is i want to match the red of those other led lights to the red of these other characters that need to be changed so what we'll do is click on the little eyedropper tool and i'm just going to take my eyedropper right once i've clicked on it i'm going to take it into the image and i'm going to go choose one of those red colors and watch what happens to that first character right it made the change it's not perfect actually i'm going to try a different color there we go that's closer it's not perfect still so what what it's doing is that eyedropper is going and making all of those adjustments for us to try to match the tone and color of whatever tone and color that i've clicked on right it's pretty close i think we could probably hone it in a little bit more but i place the control point there i'm going to just direct it a little bit and it needs to be slightly brighter so we've used the eyedropper to match the color i think the brightness is a little bit dark so i'm going to go ahead and bring that back just a touch saturation is good let's go ahead and increase the red a little bit more and i'm happy with that and then let's say that um we want to get the exact same adjustment from this to here what we can do is just duplicate this control point and place it on top of this character and do the same thing in the corner here to duplicate a control point there's actually a couple ways of doing it i'm going to use the option click and drag way of doing it where if you're on a mac you hold the option key down if you're on a pc a windows based machine you're going to hold the control button down so you hold option click on the control point you want to make a duplicate of and then just drag so it's option click and drag that's pretty close it's not perfect in terms of the way that the adjustment is um changing those colors i think that's just a little bit too dark and then we option click and drag and that has gone and corrected all of those areas and what's interesting or wonderful about this is i didn't have to make any selections really i didn't even have to make any adjustments i just had to use the colored picker to go and choose the color for us to kind of standardize all those colors from there i'm going to click fit to screen and now when we sort of scroll out a little bit now there isn't that sort of like jarring white tone and those characters kind of blend a little bit more together um from there let's let's keep moving so let's add some more control points i want to direct your attention as the viewer in towards this this the giant tower here so we're going to drop a control point into some of the values you kind of have to just choose and then i'm going to direct your attention towards it by adding more saturation and then maybe even adding a little bit of warmth right so we can warm that up i can maybe duplicate that control point place it up here there's a duplicate and maybe i'll brighten that duplicate up again to duplicate its option click and drag you can also excuse me you can also do a command c command v right so if i'm clicked on this control point command c copies and command v should paste it i think there's something going on with my software some of these are not working for me so i'll place the point there good i like that sort of warmth that we're getting and honestly we could just sit here on this image and kind of play for quite a long time i can drop a control point on the green i'm going to add a little bit more green and add a little bit more blue and then maybe brighten those tones up just to touch that sort of the swath of the green there place the point it makes a selection and then i've added i've made it cooler right by adding green and by adding blue i'm kind of creating a little bit more color contrast by cooling this area compared to the red or the tower there remember when we started to mess around with the red green and blue sliders i sort of decided that the blue looked good in the sky well when we initially had done that we were using the global adjustment let's take a control point place it in the sky here and uh see what happens if we add in some blue so i'll go and add the control point i've encompassed the entire sky let's add some structure it's going to give us some texture out of those clouds and then let's add some more blue just a little bit dab will do you and then maybe remove a little bit of red it's going to add some cyan if we like that effect and maybe we want to see what's happening over on the other side we just hold option click and drag we've got a duplicate over here you know of course we can make adjustments however we see fit are necessary to our duplicate but we really could just sit here and play and this is one of the beauties of the vasa is that you know you can go and drop a point be like you know what what would this look like back here if i removed a little bit of yellow or green right so i place that point scroll down i'm going to remove a little bit of green oops i missed the slider i was watching what i was doing instead of watching the slider and then i'm going to remove a little bit of blue and the reason i want to do that is now i've kind of neutralized the green that was coming off of these light bulbs and hitting the wall there and by doing that it's actually technically not natural light wouldn't do that but we now have color separation so the blue lights or sorry the green lights here are not being affected by those control points but the wall back there is being affected by the control point and it allows us to kind of create a little bit more separation either with color or with the density of it by taking the brightness down um or whatever we need to do right like let's say i duplicate this point place it over here and then i decide well you know what that doesn't work so well i can just go and make adjustments to my different basic adjustments and sliders um now i've played with this image for a couple minutes we covered control points we talked a lot about how the selections are being made uh the the control points are very very powerful and it takes a little getting used to because they are a different thought process and they work a different way than a lot of other target adjusted sort of features and tools but you literally drop the point on the object you want to adjust and then think about the adjustments you want to make you don't have to worry about making very precise selections manually or even in a relatively automatic way you literally drop the point and it does the thing for you so it's really handy because it's it's manual enough to have control but it's automated enough um so you don't have to do any real work you know you don't have to spend an hour making a selection of a thing you just drop the point and say okay i'm going to brighten that area up or whatever you want to do i'm going to click the apply button in the lower right corner uh i want to show you one more image because we're coming up on 447. boy time sure does fly in these webinars uh hopefully you've found this to be beneficial so far long story short we're back here in photo um photoflab four here is our original image here is our enhanced image i should have shown you the before and after before like while we were in vivesa but here's the before there's the after the idea is we sort of corrected some different areas and directed the viewer's attention through the image let's jump into this photograph i want to show you how to make a preset and i want to show you another one of the really powerful tools that's brand new with invivesa and that is the color temperature tool which does offer some interesting opportunities for controlling the image um this photograph i i need to just mention what it is because that's why i'm allowed to use it because i'm going to mention it this is an image from the rit big shot which is a huge public art project that the university that i work at um teach for does this public art project almost every year right now we haven't done one since 2019 because of you know covid at this point but um it's a really wonderful public art project where we find some sort of structure uh usually architectural structure sometimes it's a naturally occurring structure sometimes and we go there at night we turn off all of the lights or if we can we just control all the lights and we light paint to make the photograph and this is just one of my favorite images this is liberty pole in downtown rochester and this was from i think the late 90s so it's it's not a new image um and this area looks pretty different now but it's a really beautiful photograph anyways we have an opportunity because we've got some light leaks this is a piece of scanned film we've got some light leaks to mess with you can kind of clean those up and then or flare possibly um and then we've got some color issues and some contrast issues so let's go into the global adjustments and first of all let's just go ahead and um bar sorry darken down burn down the whole image just a little bit maybe five percent we're gonna add a little bit of contrast uh i say we actually warm this image globally just a little bit and then looking at the photograph it has a little bit of cyan in it so i'm going to remove the red if i take it too far it becomes quite noticeable right but if i just go a little bit here like five or ten percent uh we're going to get this really nice neutral looking image right well we can take that one step further right i'm kind of like trying to manually white balance based upon my eye with this piece of scanned film mind you it doesn't matter that it's scanned film it just is helpful in this situation because the color is off so i can fix it here but you do this with digital images as well i'm going to zero out the color sliders instead of doing it by eye we're going to use the new white balance tool that's built into the vasa and to do that let's hide the global adjustments let's go into the white balance and in white balance i just have to make sure i've turned this little check box on and then i can use my color picker to go into the photograph and choose an area in the image that should be neutral that is gray without color in it you know void of color so it will be a tone shouldn't necessarily be white it shouldn't necessarily be black but it should be something in between it should be something that should be neutral so in in the photo biz if you will you'd have gray cards that works really well we don't have a gray card here so we're just going to go find something that should be gray and what works well in this case um is the sort of dormer i guess on this structure over on the right side of the frame so if i click there almost nothing happens but that's because the color balance isn't that different but if i go and click on something that is incorrect you can see what it does it goes and shifts the color with this white balance to something a little bit more creative if you will so you know you we can go and basically just keep using this color picker to choose different colors this is actually kind of a nice result i clicked down in here and this is probably neutralizing based upon these lights which are tungsten tungsten halogen lights and then this is the reflection of the sidewalk so you know what let's run with that it looks a little bit cool on my screen right now but it's fun let's let's let's do it so i've got my color picker i've got my global adjustments let's say we love this and we want to save it as a preset so the next time we want to make these same exact adjustments i don't have to do any work i just have to click on a preset within my custom section well to generate a preset you just click the save preset button that's down in the lower right corner of the interface so you click that button and you say you just name your preset so i'm going to call this tungsten white balance and brightness correction this is very specific right it's for this image and it'd probably be four other images shot at the same time and day using these weird luminance and flashlights and things um but the naming you know needs to be as specific as the look that you're creating so this is very specific because it's just for this image and maybe some very similar images um other photographs you might create you know your false color infrared oh by the way i just opened up my left side of the interface by clicking that little triangle over there on the far left and that opens up that preset browser and in the custom section we're going to have our tungsten white balance and bright blah blah right our presets going to be right there so that's there that's our preset i'm happy with that now let's talk about some of the last tools that we've not talked about yet and that is the selective tones so um moving into the global adjustments and i'm pretty sure i define global adjustments in selective but just in case i didn't any any slider that's under the global adjustments section if you adjust that it's going to affect the entire photograph right so this highlights slider is controlling the brightness level of the highlights in the image so that is the the the lightness or the brightness it's the luminance of the very brightest values and you can brighten them or darken them and they are going to affect the image um globally but only in those specific tones right you can do the same with mid-tones maybe i'll darken down the shadows a little bit to make the image look a little bit more you know it adds some contrast but it's a very specific contrast because i can control the shadows separately from the mid-tone separately from the highlights it's a really nice way of controlling the image um you know what's interesting too the shadows slider that's up here the shadow slider in the global adjustments actually has a slightly different look than the shadows slider down here in the selective tone it actually does something slightly different so what i'll do is i'll kind of play with those sliders a little bit and figure out okay you know what 10 shadows that looks good i also want to go and bring this down you know maybe 50 right or 30 and because they do a slightly different control uh i get a slightly different look which is really quite lovely to be able to have that much control over my photography you know with these relatively you know useful and very very useful but relatively simple to use sets of sliders um i love that aspect okay last thing i'm going to do before we sort of transition into the q a because i realize i'm running out of time here i always try and put way too much stuff in these webinars because there's always things to talk about um but the the beauty of it is you grow with the software you know you you get used to it you play with the presets use the global adjustments definitely dive right into the control points um because you won't get used to them unless you you really do just really play with them but we can kind of correct that lens flare that's down in the bottom of the image uh by reducing the red and probably even reducing a little bit of green and introducing maybe a little bit of blue um and i'll show you what that what the result is and it's not perfect uh but it sure does get rid of a lot of that uh that red flare that was occurring i think the color that's happening here is actually a flashlight or a flash that's illuminating right there you could get rid of that drop the point hypothetically as well we don't even need to do that work i just sort of went ahead and you know made those adjustments manually what we could do is actually leave the control point there and then use this color picker not the white balance color picker sorry use the color picker under control points and uh maybe click right here oops had the wrong control point activated let me delete that my computer's starting to overheat now uh okay sorry about that we're gonna click on our color picker if my computer can keep up there we go place that point and now that control point should have matching adjustment right so it basically just matched this area to that area with the control point and if we take a quick look at the before and after using the compare button you know we went from here uh to there very different color we probably i would definitely spend some more time sort of adjusting different tones and areas but we got rid of that flare in the lower right we match some tones and um that's viveza all right lori do we have any questions that i can get to here we do have a couple i won't let everybody know um thank you for your questions i try to answer as many as i can um couldn't get to all of them but i saved four of them damn for you cool hopefully we can get to these so meryl was asking uh when trying out the different presets is the program adding a preset on top of another preset or is it going back to the original great question merrill yeah it's going back to the original so anytime i click if i click color ir right now that so i'll click it the reason why this warning comes up so adding this preset will replace all parameters right so if i click yes all the work that i just did basically disappears right my control points everything now if you ever do that by mistake you can just hit command z to go back one step right it'll undo it but um yeah because because of the way the sliders and adjustment tools work and there isn't a way to kind of like separate them out as a layer or something like there is within color effects pro the the presets kind of overwrite it's the same as what happens in silver effects same same idea silverfx pro has the same kind of preset function okay david c is asking when do you do white balance in your workflow great question yeah so uh i tend to do my white balance in my raw processor that's that's where i would do it um it it does yield a different result um here you know you can use the white balance for creative purposes or if you need to you know if you don't have white balance built into um your your initial processor for some reason you can do that there but it is you know the the benefit of having it in viveza here is that we now have a nick plugin that has white balance right so it's kind of getting to a more full function kind of tool um whereas before it didn't have white balance right and now it does so personally i would do that within photo lab or whatever my raw processor is good question david okay while we're talking about that rachel wants to know if you let's say change your white balance can you undo it and can you show her how to undo that oh yeah um you you can you can undo it by clicking somewhere else right so okay there's a few ways to do this if you go and you use your color picker and you choose a color that's you know not working for you you could just tap command z right that goes back one step you could turn off white balance because this with this check box is off that tool doesn't do anything or you actually could go to your temperature slider and you could start adjusting your temperature and that basically resets it that's a great question i didn't kind of i didn't go into the temperature slider i also didn't talk about radius so when you're using the eyedropper this radius tool allows you to sample from different numbers of pixels right different sizes so if i sample um you know part of the if i sample let's say like the road here and i'm really close to this person the police officer on the horse um it's only gonna sample five pixels the way that it's set but if i go and i increase my radius to 50 pixels or somewhere in between now if i go you can see my brush my thing has changed size right my little cursor there now when i click on it i get something different right so it's basically a way to kind of hone in the control depending upon how precise you want to be and you know it would also probably be a good idea if you are only sampling five pixels or two pixels or some low low amount of pixels zoom in so that you can kind of see what's happening and you know exactly what pixel you're clicking on or close to it at least thanks for answering that dan because somebody else had that question as well that was good okay uh last question robert well i'd like to know can you still group control points with the new bavesa yes you can yep so the question to group control points there are two ways to do it there's a shortcut which is command g when you have active control points or you can use the buttons on the right so i'll just show you so let's say we have a grouping or a a bunch of control points and they're all on similar objects and we want to group them together so that we can adjust one set of points or one point that affects all four right or five or however many control points you want to group um i need to activate all of them uh currently this point is active i know that because the con you know the area of influence is out inactive and also it's gold you can see that little orange gold control point you can activate multiple control points two ways you can hold the shift button down two ways on the image anyways you can hold the contr the shift button down and click on each control point or you can literally just click your mouse and drag around all of the control points that you want activated you literally just click and drag and now these are all active and if i tap command g it will group them all together as a shortcut if i um don't want to use the control pointer for if i forget you just again activate the control points and then there's a little button underneath the control points list that looks like a little folder when you click on the little folder that has the control point in it that groups those points together and so now this control point kind of becomes the the main control point although i could just kind of click on whichever one um and then control it from there so we can adjust brightness you know neutralize the saturation do whatever we want to do cool excellent okay well we want to thank everybody for joining us today dan thank you for another wonderful webinar we hope that you learned some tips and tricks on this new vivesa and dan i'm gonna go ahead and uh let you close out but thanks again everybody for joining us today awesome thank you lori yeah geez i you know it's crazy how fast an hour goes by i hopefully you found this to be beneficially learned a little or a lot about using the uh the vasa 3 software and you know we were talking about urban pictures if you will and the ones that i chose i just thought were you know a challenge they weren't um images that that were just super straightforward so hopefully you found that to be beneficial thanks again for joining ladies and gentlemen and hopefully we see you again soon at another one of these webinars thanks [Music] you

Channel: Nik Collection

Views: 1,987

Keywords: Nik Collection, Nik Collection by DxO, Editing software, Lightroom, PhotoShop, HDR, nik sofware, viveza, sharpener pro, urban photography edit, urban photography, urban photography tips, urban photography editing lightroom pc, urban photography edit in photoshop, urban photography editing lightroom, urban street photography editing, city photography edit, city photography editing, cityscape, city photography, moody edit, editing tutorial, photography editing, photo edit, editing

Id: D3dXTwMy0EA

Length: 61min 12sec (3672 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 06 2021