I finished this adjustment by pushing the Brightness slider a little to the right. When you’re adjusting a slider, the others are hidden, but when you release the mouse button they’re visible again. If I push the Structure slider up to maximum, the textures and shading in the tulip really start to leap out. It increases contrast on a localised basis, but with a much finer effect than most localised contrast tools. The Structure tool is Nik Software’s secret weapon. You can adjust the size of the area with the top slider, but don’t bother trying to get the effect area right first time – the more control points you add, the more selective the adjustments become anyway. This is only approximate because of the self-masking nature of the tool. If you click and hold on the control point, a larger circle indicates its approximate range. You can reveal more by clicking on the arrow at the bottom of the list, but I’m not going to use them. Dial in color and contrast with Nik Viveza, or experiment with one of the creative presets in Nik HDR Efex to add a true sense of depth to your images. The control point has four sliders: Brightness, Contrast, Saturation and Structure. Nik Color Efex and Nik Viveza are the perfect tools for travel photography, following you off the beaten track to come back from your adventures with photos that capture the whole experience. I want to start by brightening up these tulips and bringing out their detail, so I’ll click the Control Point button in the tools panel on the right (circled in red), then click in the middle of one of the tulip heads. It’s nice to be able to use a creative tool rather than a technical one! 01 Add a control point Viveza 2 doesn’t demand any great technical knowledge instead, it relies on the photographer’s ability to see just what will make a photograph work. There are quite a few steps, but they’re all very straightforward, and they show how the effect can be built up. So bear with me as I set to work with Viveza 2. Technically, it’s all right, but the lighting is rather too flat and it doesn’t have the vibrance and ‘sparkle’ I was looking for. To show how this can work, I’m starting with this relatively plain shot of a vase of tulips. But it’s when you use them in combination that they really start to shine. On their own, these control points don’t necessarily appear much more useful than an adjustment layer in Elements, say, and the automatic masking is not always that effective. So is Viveza 2 redundant? I don’t think so! I have spent some time with it, and I think the secret is using multiple control points, not just one. You can use them with Colour Efex Pro 4’s Levels and Curves filter, for example, to apply localised brightness and contrast adjustments in a similar way. These control points turn up everywhere in Nik Software, from Silver Efex Pro to Color Efex Pro, HDR Efex Pro and even Snapseed, as ways of fine-tuning and enhancing your effects. It’s designed as a kind of colour ‘dodging and burning’ tool, where you use Nik Software’s clever control points to both mask and adjust specific areas of the photograph at the same time. Viveza 2 is part of the DxO Nik Collection, but it’s often overlooked because it meets a fairly narrow need.
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