Camera Labs

I've been looking at some plugins for Lightroom. I downloaded a free onOne preset plugin which is very helpful, but I also came across a Nik Software plugin collection for Lightroom. It's not cheap, EUR 299.95, but does include Dfine 2.0, Viveza, Color Efex Pro 3.0, Silver Efex Pro and Sharpener Pro 3.0.

I quite like Color Efex and the possibility to use for instance film filters and I hear Viveza is supposed to be something special.

Does anyone have experience with Nik Software? Is it worth it?

I'll download a trial version as soon as I have more time to work with it, but I was curious to hear about people's experiences.

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Canon 7D | EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 IS

Hi Dutch,

I've used Viveza and found it to be very worthwhile and a real timesaver for certain images. As you probably know, it allows you to make selective colour adjustments, you can, for example, make colour balance adjustments to one region of an image, leaving the rest untouched. It's really useful for adjusting skies and I've also used it for beach shots. It would also be good for portraiture or basically anything where you need to selectively colour balance bits of an image.

You can do the same thing in Photoshop, but it takes a lot longer to make the selection and image mask. Also, Viveza works with Lightroom and Aperture so, providing you don't have other photoshop work to do, you can keep everything in a version with no need to round trip..

Ken

Thanks for the response Ken.
Viveza and Color Efex are the two I'm most interested in. I heard great things about Viveza, and Color Efex seems to be a very nice creative tool.

Vizeza has the u-point technology that I really liked in Capture NX 2, but I prefer the speed of Lightroom. If I can use Viveza as a plugin for Lightroom I might get the best of both worlds.

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Canon 7D | EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 IS

I´ve been meaning to download some trials for some time now, but your post here actually made me do it...

Anyway, I tried out Viveza, DFine and Sharpener Pro. My impressions?
Well, I wasn´t to impressed with Sharpener Pro, and since I hardly have any use for Viveza, I didn´t fancy that either. BUT.

DFine was incredible . It was amazing how easy it was, and it produced such great results... Absolutely love it.

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Nikon D90 (Primary), Nikon D40 (Backup)
AF-S DX 35mm f/1,8
AF-S 60mm f/2,8 micro
AF-S DX 55-200mm f/4-5.6 VR
2 x Speedlight SB-600

That's good to hear, thanks for sharing!

I'm hoping that I'll have some more time to try out a trial version in the coming month, I just finished work on my PhD proposal so the pressure is off for a few weeks.

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Canon 7D | EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 IS

I don't know if there are a lot of people interested in these plugins, but here's my (very quick) first impression.

I got the complete collection for Lightroom 2.3 (or higher) a few days ago and it includes Viveza, Color Efex Pro 3.0, Silver Efex Pro, Dfine 2.0 and Sharpener Pro 3.0. The interface is really easy to use despite being an external editor. A RAW image can be adjusted in Lightroom and afterwards edited in any of the plugins. The plugin creates a TIFF or jpeg copy (with lightroom adjustments) that can be edited.

I haven't yet used Viveza, so I can't comment on that. The amount of filters in Color Efex is amazing and can give unexpected and very creative results. Similarly Silver Efex allows a lot of creativity for B/W conversion. Both have special film-filters and a very good way to introduce grain. The grain is of a high quality that can be adjusted to taste. Both Dfine and Sharpener Pro are excellent tools that produce very high quality results.

Here's an example image I created using Silver Efex. (Just a quick edit of an older picture.)

"Rest some"

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Canon 7D | EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 IS