I don’t miss much about the Louisiana summer. But, I do miss hot weekend days on the porch drinking gin and tonics, talking with the neighbors and reading. My friend Luca has been expressing interest in a print of this image for a long time. But, it took me a while to dig it up. I shot it back in 2009, when I had a gargantuan lime tree in the backyard that made for some very fine gin and tonics.
Once I had located the file, hidden back in the recesses of my image library, I decided to tweak it a bit from the original. I’m not sure if I took it in a direction that will appeal to Luca, but I like the changes.
At Imaging USA this year, I picked up a copy of Nik Software’s Viveza. I am just getting my feet wet with it but so far it seems like a very powerful application for selectively correcting all sorts of things. Mainly it allows you to do more refined dodge and burn type stuff but also lets you throw in structure, shadow preservation, contrast and several other crucial aspects of balancing the apparent dynamic range in your photos.
I also found myself using it a fair bit yesterday in a shoot for Country Roads Magazine. Viveza really give you a tremendous amount of control over light and color in your images and it lets you apply these changes very specifically as opposed to universally which is generally the case with programs like Aperture or Lightroom. Can you do the same things in the aforementioned software that you can do with Viveza? Pretty much, but it is a lot harder and the effect is not always as pleasing. Score another one for the good folks at Nik.
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