Selections. If you love making them, then by all means, this blogpost is not for you. If however you’re like 99% of the photographers who prefer shooting to making selections to optimize their pictures, please read on.
Lightroom already has a nifty – and often overlooked – little feature that allows you to selectively control the luminance, hue and saturation of the different colours in the HSL Panel. It’s called the TAT or Targeted Adjustment Tool °. You activate it by clicking on the symbol with the two concentric circles (encircled in red in the screenshot above). Once activated, two little arrows appear above and below. The TAT-tool allows you to manipulate certain colours without changing others. You just select in the HSL panel the attribute you want to change (Hue, Saturation or Luminance) and then you click a colour on the image and while keeping the mouse button down, you drag the tool up or down, which will result in the corresponding sliders shifting left or right. It’s great for darkening skies, for example. By the way, the TAT tool is also available for B&W conversions, and is very handy to control the greyscale conversion of different colours (i.e. how light or dark those colours will appear in the greyscale image).The 
only disadvantage is that it will apply the same effect to all occurences of that colour throughout the picture. So, if your subject happens to be wearing a sky-coloured sweater, you will darken that as well.
Luckily, Lightroom, as of version 2, also offers non-destructive local editing tools: the Graduated Filter and the Local Adjustment Brush. The latter even sports an ‘Auto-Mask’ feature, allowing you to paint masks more quickly. But you still have to paint.
This is where Viveza can help. This plugin by Nik Software uses Nik’s patented U-Point technology to intelligently make masks for you. U-Point Technology reduces the almost scientific procedure of making complex masks (ever done Channel Operations in Photoshop, anyone?) to the user-friendly dragging around of a couple of sliders.
You simply set a Control Point on the area you want to edit, you define the size of the area by dragging a slider, and then control the Brightness, Contrast and Saturation. There are even more advanced selective colour corrections of the Hues, Reds, Greens, Blues and the Warmth.
When I tried Viveza, I immediately liked it’s intuitiveness and it’s speed. The masks it creates are very smooth, and you really have to go into the extremes before you start to see masking artefacts (but then again, if you would make a manual mask, you would have the same problem). In fact, one of the biggest problems in manual masking is to make the mask smooth and ‘believable’, so the picture doesn’t look ‘doctored’. This is where Viveza really shines.
Needless to say, the plugin quickly found it’s way into my workflow. A quick tip here: Viveza renders out a Tiff file, on which you perform your edits. You can set up this file to be 8 or 16 bit (the latter is advised, of course). Because of this, it’s best to use it at the end of your Lightroom workflow, i.e. you first make all the necessary adjustments in Lightroom (working non-destructively as long as possible) and then use Viveza. (There is even a way to include Viveza in the non-destructive workflow, but for that you’ll have to use the Photoshop version of the plugin, see below.)
However, I do (or should I say ‘did’) have a few remarks with Version 1 of the plugin: I lacked an undo-function, for one. I also would have loved to be able to selectively apply ‘Structure’ (which is Nik’s version of ‘Clarity’).
It seems I was not the only one missing those features because, low and behold, this week Nik released Viveza 2, which boasts a number of improvements while maintaining the simple and user-friendly approach and interface. Unlimited undo’s and localized Structure control are but a few of those new features!
You can download the trial version of Viveza here but be warned: it’s highly addictive and trying will probably mean buying 
. If you like the U-Point technology, and do a lot of Black & White, you might also be interested in Silver Efex Pro, Nik’s B&W conversion software. Because of the streamlined interface, if you know one plugin, you’ll be quickly up to speed with the other as well. I blogged about Silver Efex Pro a while ago.
You can buy Viveza as a separate plugin, which will work with either Lightroom & Photoshop or Aperture & Photoshop. Viveza 2 is priced at 199 €. And while that isn’t exactly cheap, if you’re a demanding amateur or a professional photographer, the software will easily pay itself back by improving your edits and speeding up your workflow. Upgrades from version 1 are 99 € including VAT, or free if you purchased Viveza 1 after september 21, 2009.
You can also buy Viveza as part of the full Plugin Suite, which further includes Silver Efex Pro, Dfine (Noise Reduction), Sharpener Pro (Capture and Output Sharpening) and Colour Efex Pro (a collection of 30 Filters). All programs make use of U-Point Technology.
The Suite, and here’s where the licensing gets a little complicated (more complicated than the actual software, at least – is available in two versions: a Lightroom only or Aperture only version, priced at 299 € including VAT and a Lightroom, Photoshop & Aperture version, priced at 599 € including VAT.
There are two main advantages to having the Photoshop-enabled version of the Suite:
- When you use the plugin in Phothoshop, you can fine-tune it’s effects even further by using layer masks
- (IMHO, this is the most important one). You can apply the settings as a smart filter on a Smart Object. This lets you re-edit your edits in Photoshop in case you should need to. This is something I regularly do, mainly if the edit is not for me but for a client, and if he might want me to change something. Whenever I think that re-edits might be necessary, I use the Photoshop version of the plugin: I simply choose ‘Edit as Smart Object’ from within Lightroom, which opens my Raw File as a Smart Object in Photoshop and then apply Viveza from within Photoshop. The fact that it’s a Smart Object even allows me not only to change Viveza’s settings, but also to double-click on the Smart Object and open up Camera Raw (and change my raw development). Talk about unlimited undoability!
There’s still one thing I would very much love to see in the Photoshop version of the plugin, and that’s the ability to export the masks the plugin creates to Photoshop. Maybe an idea for Viveza 3?
° There’s even a TAT-tool in the curves panel as well, but since this works on global RGB Luminance values, the control it offers is more limited.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Yes, I love the ability to make targeted adjustments via U-point, and the Structure feature in Viveza 2 is awesome – so far (after admittedly brief evaluation) it seems better than the Clarity feature in Lightroom or CaptureOne, and better than Tonal Contrast in ColorEfexPro. I haven’t compared it to Topaz Detail or any others. My only problem with using the Nik Suite/Photoshop over Capture NX2/ColorEfexPro3 is that the Nik selections/masks can not be shared in Photoshop (e.g. you can’t export masks created in one plugin for use in another plugin or some other Photoshop function). This is why I love doing local adjustments in NX2 – you can select a target then apply Noise Reduction AND Saturation adjustments to the same target, as example. On the other hand, my only problem using NX2/ColorEfex is that there is no equivalent to the Structure function in NX2. I can usually simulate clarity by using the tone curve, sharpening, and high-pass filter, but the one-slider clarity adjustment sure makes it easy. I’m guessing all I need to do is buy the Nik Suite for Photoshop in order to get Nik to put the Structure feature in Capture NX(3) ;-}