Mastering the Nik Collection - 9: Viveza 2 (Intro)

hey guys this is Anthony Morgan T from online photography training.com welcome to my video series mastering the Nik collection several years ago the Nik collection of plugins was the number one set of plugins for Photoshop and Lightroom cashing in on their success they sold off to Google Google marketed the suite for a couple years with a few updates then they announced that they would not be updating the software any longer and they made it free to download around that time I did a set of training videos on the software that proved to be very popular recently the company DxO purchased the rights to the Nik collection and announced that they would be developing and updating it although it's no longer free it is nice to have a caretaker for this software because it is very good with all the good things happening with Nik I decided to update my training videos on the product this new series will be more in-depth and thorough than the previous series please be aware that I have no affiliation with the company I'm not being paid by them to do these videos and if you purchase the software I will not be making a commission on the sale with that said if you could do me a favor if you like these videos please click the thumbs up button and share them finally if you can make a donation I would greatly appreciate it that info is in the description below this video along with a link to my code of ethics statement let's get started in this video we're gonna take a look at Vevey satu by Nik software as you can see I already have the program open with an image in this video I'm just gonna give you an overview of some of the major features that are available in Vevey so - in our next video I'm gonna show you how to use vasa - as a Lightroom plugin and in that video I'll get into a little more detail about some of these features and then in the video after that I'm gonna show you how to use Vevey so - as a photoshop plugin and i'll cover some more features in detail in the program so by the end of these three videos you should be of a visa to expert now as far as this image I did send it in to vevey so - from Lightroom it was a raw file in Lightroom and the only processing I did was lens correction so we're really gonna be processing the image just about from scratch here in Vevey so - now as far as the Vives a workspace it's a pretty typical NIC workspace except there's no presets so when you send an image into via the vasa - you have to process it from scratch along the top we have some different views I'll show you those in a moment and along the top right we have you know the hand tool to move it around and we could zoom it in and out and then we have this little button here to change the border coloring from different shades of grey and this little button will close down this panel which are is our adjustments panel and that's what we'll be talking about right now now right along the top you could see there's control points and that's one of the major features of Nik software our control points below that are some global adjustments you can see it says global and there's a bunch of sliders there now if you don't see all these sliders there's these little buttons to the right of where it says global you may be in this mode where it's only showing four sliders if you are just click that little button right next to that and you'll have all the sliders showing below that is our control point list which you'll see in a moment when we start laying down some control points below that is levels and curves we have the tone curve and we have some level sliders down at the bottom and we'll cover that in this series and then below that is a little loop so wherever you hover over we'll be zoomed in on that loop or if you do like use a magnifier to zoom in you'll get like a little view of where you are on that loop like trying to do it there it is there's a little box right there there it is see it so that is what that means and we'll zoom back up now as far as processing is concerned I mentioned that we have these sliders and it says global be aware that this will change from global adjustments to control point adjustments so right now any adjustments I do because it says global will be done to the entire image and some of these sliders are pretty basic sliders I mean brightness you know what that does right you could turn up or down brightness if you want to reset a slider to its detent position just double click right on the slider and it will reset it to in this case 0% a contrast of course will add or remove contrast saturation is color saturation if you pull all the way down and will have a black and white image and if you push it all the way up you'll have an oversaturated image structure is like clarity and Lightroom so it's just gonna give you some mid-tone contrast which gives the effect of making the image sharper if you pull it down it's going to soften the image a little bit so we'll reset that shadow adjustments just really adjust the shadows if you push this slider to the right you'll open up the shadows if you pull the slider down to the left you're gonna crush the shadows or make the shadows darker I'll warm if you move it to the right you'll make the image warmer if you move it to left you'll make it cooler now we have some colors red green and blue well if you move red let's say to the right you're going to tinge the picture red see how we're adding red to the image now when you move it to the left you could say that you're taking red out of the picture but really what's more accurate is you're going to be adding cyan to the picture the way these color sliders work the red green and blue color sliders when you move them to the left you're going to add the subtractive complementary color to that sliders color meaning the subtractive complementary color of red is cyan so when I move this to the left we're gonna add cyan to the imager we're gonna tinge the image cyan the subtractive complementary color of green is magenta so if I move this to the left we'll start adding magenta to the image and for blue the subtractive complementary color is yellow so when I move this to the left we're gonna add yellow to the image now an easy way to remember that you think of red green blue you think of RGB when you think of the subtractive complementary colors you might have heard of C my debts goes in order red green blue see my cyan for red magenta for green yellow for blue so that's a way you could remember it of course you could just come in and slide the slider and go that's yellow of course you you could actually kind of alter the hue of all the colors by moving this around it will give you some odd effects since it's just one single slider you could reset them all of course with that reset button we're gonna talk about this dropper in a moment that comes into effect when we're using actual control points now as far as levels and curves I'm just going to give you a quick overview quite often with curves which is what this diagonal line is we like to use it to add contrast to the image and what the curve represents or what the diagonal line represents is basically all the darkest tones are in this lower left-hand side so blacks are down here and as you start moving towards the right-hand corner of this box we're going from blacks to shadows to darker mid-tones to lighter mid-tones to highlights to whites and if you want to make let's say the mid-tones brighter you would put a point on the mid-tone and push it up and it will make mid-tones brighter if you want to make mid-tones darker take that same point and pull it down so you're going to alter the tones in a specific part of that curve so typically we use or often we use a tone curve to add contrast to an image and the way really all contrast is is that dark parts get a little darker and the light parts get a little lighter so what we often do is put a point right in the middle to anchor it this anchors the mid-tones then we go down here where the darker shadows are down towards the blacks well put a point there and we'll pull that down so we're going to make the darker tones a little darker and then we go up here and we go where the highlights are the lighter highlights put a point there and push that up so we're making the highlights a little lighter so we in effect added contrast to the image by putting the curve into what is called an s-curve and that's what we will often use that for so we'll reset that then levels is you could just change the midpoint of where of the midpoint of the mid-tones are or where the shadows are or where the highlights are and again I'll cover that more detail in a future episode but what we really want to do with this image is this partially how I process it using Vevey so too we're not going to mess with the tone curve for this image and as I mentioned it's pretty much even though Nick does not work on raw files this is a tiff file when you and you'll see in our next video we're gonna send a raw file from Lightroom into vevey z'n it first converts it into a tiff file all the only thing I did to the image was lens correction so we're starting really from scratch now brightness I think is all right I want to add a little bit of contrast so I'm gonna move the contrast slider to the right and again these are global adjustments they're using or affecting the whole image I'll add a touch of saturation I'll move that to the right now I'm going to add a bit of structure as well remember structures like clarity and Lightroom and let's see do I want to open up shadows a touch oh no I think actually my shadow adjustment maybe will bring him down yeah bring shadows down just a little bit and warmth do I want to make it a little warmer maybe yeah it just may be a touch warmer just a little bit now I'm not going to do anything with red green blue or the hue I'm gonna work on that with control points which we're gonna do right now so I want to add a control point to the sky I want to make the blue sky bluer because if I just came down here with the global adjustment and move blue to the right it will make the blue sky bluer but it's kind of putting blue everywhere and I don't want that so excuse me put that back we'll reset that there we go I'm gonna get a control point so I'm gonna click right here and I'm gonna go up in the blue sky over here in the left-hand corner and click it now you'll see we have all these sliders these sliders are the exact same sliders you have over here so you see that BR is brightness Co is contrast si a saturation STS structure structure SH is shadows adjustment and so on now that very top one that's really not labeled what that is let me get a different there we go there very top one that isn't labeled that is the size of the area of influence you can see as I move it to the right we're making this circle bigger that means that's the area of influence that this control point is going to affect now what exactly is it affecting well when I brought that control point over and clicked it on that blue sky right where that point is the software is looking at the color tone and texture that is directly under that point and in this area of influence it's going to look for similar color tone in contrast and that's what these sliders will affect so if I take brightness down it's going to effectively hopefully leave the white alone because I'm not clicked on the white clouds it's not going to affect the green trees on the hill it's only going to affect the color tone and texture of the blue sky right where I clicked and it will mainly stay within that circle now it does affect a little bit outside the circle it's kind of feathered outside so that's how the control point kind of will allow you to mask your just meant to a specific area now I kind of like that I brought as you might have noticed I brought brightness down now if we jump over here to the right and we look at this area now it no longer says global it says selective this is actually this control point so I could come in here and I could just adjust this and you could see how it's adjusting that control point not it's not a global adjustment anymore so I kind of like that and I want to make it a bit bluer so I'm going to go to blue and I'm going to just tweak that up a little bit okay so I like that I'm gonna bring that down a touch now I want to effect the entire blue sky so I want to put one over here right here maybe so I could add just another one click here and add another one but I want to use the same settings so why don't I just duplicate this one the easiest way to do that is hold the alt or option key alt if you have a PC option if you have Mac then just click on that little button and drag one off and you're gonna drag a whole new one off and you could put it over there so now we have these two and I get adjust the size of this one independently of that one and I could adjust all these settings alone now maybe I want to adjust them together and as it is now this one selected so I'm only adjusting that one if I go over here on the right panel I'll only be adjusting that one so I'd like to adjust them together there's three different ways to do that one way is to just go outside of one of them and then click with your left mouse button you see I'm drawing kind of a rectangle around the two of them and once I do that let go you'll see they're both active now any adjustment I do to one goes to the other one as well now you see how I move in the contrast slider and it's moving the contrast slider on the left one as well also if I go over here to the Selective adjustment area here this contrast slider moves both of them as well so that is one way you could I put them together more or less than adjust more than one control point now another way is you could click on one hold the shift key in and click on the other one and if I had like five of these I would just keep holding the shift key in and keep clicking on all of them and now they're both selected again and I could do it that way now another way is you could go over here where we have our control points and we have control point one is this one and control point two is that one and I could just select them there by clicking on one and because I have a Mac I would hold the command key and if you have a PC to hold the control key and click on that second one now they're both selected and you could do it that way now if you have a bunch of control points that are doing the same thing it may be beneficial to you to put them in a group because if we start adding lots of control points to an image it gets confusing in the control point list so what we could do is have them both selected like they are now and go right here where it says group and just click there and you can see that we now have Group one so whenever that is active we're gonna affect every single control point in that group and it will give you one representative control point that you could adjust that will adjust everything so if I come in here and I go in like brightness crazy you see how it's adjusting all the both of those control points so that is how you would group them and of course you could ungroup them if you'd want right there so I kind of like that now I got this kind of white sky cloud area over here that doesn't show really anything I think it's a little bright and I don't like that bright area near the corner of my frame so I'm going to add a control point there so I'm just gonna click right there and I'm going to bring brightness down on this and just not too much because then it will start changing color on me so I just want to bring it down a little bit and maybe bring structure up now you'll notice too that the these adjustments are for the active control point which is the cloud control point I'll call it that the cloud control point it's actually control point 3 okay so um what did I say Oh structure I want to turn structure up give me a little more structure in those clouds so it gives us a little more detail there now if I want to see where that control point is affecting if I go over here and I click this little box right there whatever is white is what is being affected by that control point whatever is black is not being affected if it's gray depending on the shade of gray that's varying affect so a very light gray is affected more than a very dark gray so I'm pretty much with this control point as you could see just affecting those clouds so I'm I'm happy with that I can click that other control point group up there and we'll see the blue sky it's affecting the blue sky mainly but you could see how it bled over into some other things so that is one kind of fault I guess with control points they're not perfect but they really do overall they'll do a good job now I want to do something with these grasses I want to what I often like to do to add some kind of tonal death I mess with the colors intensity a little bit or the luminance values of the color meaning especially with grass I'd like to make the yellows that are in the grass a little brighter and the greens a little darker and you could do that here I'm going to get a control point I'm gonna go right on something that's kind of more yellow like right there alright so now this the I could do these sliders right here but I like going up over here I just think it's easier to see what I'm doing and I'm gonna take saturation and I'm gonna pull that up now I hopefully I'm on yellow and I could check that in a moment take brightness up a little bit and I can click on that control point and hopefully it's mainly getting yellow now while that is on this kind of negative view I could kind of move it around and see if I could better there that's better isn't it I'm more on those yellow tips of those grasses so I think that's better all the grass in the background that cut lawn that was more yellow than it was green so that's that's pretty cool I kind of like that so we'll turn that off so I kind of made that yellow you come in here if you make it even a little brighter now I mentioned that we have this eyedropper and color swatch thing here what you could do with the eyedropper is you could whatever that control point is on you could make it a color you want how you do that well with the eyedropper click on the eyedropper and let's say I want to make whatever that control point is controlling blue so I'll go up here in the blue sky and click on the blue sky and you'll see that it actually more or less made that area that the control point is controlling it added blue to it now obviously I don't like that so I'm going to hit command Z to undo that if you have a PC it's ctrl Z to undo it so that's that color dropper the other thing you do is you click right on the color swatch and this what will pop up here is dependent on your operating system if you use a Mac you'll get this color picker where you could switch around and you could actually just kind of pick a color like I want it to be purple like that just like that close that down there now it's purple I don't like that of course so I'm gonna command Z out of that hopefully okay I wouldn't let me command Z out of that one for some reason to undo it there we go that's better but we kind of lost our adjustment so I'm going to come back in here and I'm at term brightness up I'm going to make sure that this is over a yellow bear with me that's pretty good there and so that's good let's just say for the sake of this demonstration that that's good so I added a little depth tonally by taking the yellows of the grasses and make those a little brighter yellow then what I'll often do is I'll make the greens the things that are more green in the grass a little darker so I'll get another control point and I'll go somewhere like here let's say and again I think I'll turn this on to look at that and make sure that I'm kind of more on green yeah I think that's pretty good right there so I'll turn that off and then what I'm gonna do here now is I'm gonna pull brightness down so I'm kind of making the greens a little darker and the yellows a little brighter now I got some yellows over here that I'd like to do that too so I'm going to duplicate this control point by holding the alt or option key in alt if you have a PC option if you have a Mac and drag this over here and make sure I'm just on those yellows so I think that looks pretty good and I think I like it I think I like it now we'll do a before after there's three different ways you could do that if you click right here in the top left hand corner we get the split screen and you could come in here and you can go there's before and there's after before after so quite a dramatic difference if I click right here we'll get an over-under view let's see there's before above it and after below it and if I click this we'll get a side-by-side with before on the left after on the right or if I go back to this single image view where it says preview right here if I click off this box you can see there's before there's after before after now I could group those green control points if I want and I could group those yellow control points that's what I'm calling them though the control points that that control that yellow so I could click on this one I'd hold the shift key and click on this one and then I could get a group here and group those together then what I could do is I could click on this green one here that's all by itself so I really don't need to put that in a group but let's say I wanted to make another green control point for something which I really don't I kind of like the way it is but if I did I'd hold that alt or option key again and again drag going up here I'll make this small so it's only affecting those hills I'll hold the alt or option key and again drag over the vase the side maybe hold it in again and drag it over here so I have four green control points I'm calling those so I could hold the shift key and select them all like I just did it's a little harder to draw that box like I showed you the first way you would kind of group two together because I got some of these yellow ones in here as well and you might incorporate those accidentally into your selection but what you could do is you could either hold the shift key and click on each individual control point or hold the command or control key and again it's command if you have a Mac control if you have a PC and click on them over here in the control a point list but I prefer actually this way because I know exactly which ones I'm doing so I'll hold the shift key in and click on that one that one I think that's all I had right so I have all those selected and I'll group those together so those are the green group so again I could come now in and readjust my representative one of those four green control points is right here so I could come in here and adjust those accordingly with that one adjustment right there or this over here where it's the Selective adjustments there so that's kind of Vevey so - in a nutshell get you an idea what you could do with it again let's do it before and after there's before after before after I think it's some pretty powerful program you could do quite a bit with it in our next episode again we're going to start in Lightroom I'm going to show you how to send an image directly from Lightroom into the vase or two and we'll get into a little more detail about some of these adjustments and what you can do and some of the limitations I think of the adjustments as well thank you everyone that watches my videos I truly do appreciate it I'll talk to you guys soon you

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 24,999

Keywords: photography, photographer, post processing, adobe, lightroom, photoshop, viveza, nik

Id: 0HmbWH8VG7I

Length: 26min 47sec (1607 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 30 2018