Product Reviews

While Apple has been keen to trumpet the extensible architecture in Aperture 2.1, third-party publishers haven't exactly been falling over themselves to get on board. In theory, Aperture could one day match Photoshop for versatility, but for now at least Aperture plug-ins are arriving in a trickle rather than a deluge. Having said that, one of the biggest names in the plug-in world, Nik Software, has already developed three Aperture plug-ins - Viveza, Silver Efex Pro and Color Efex 3.0. You can download 15-day trials of all three from the Nik website.

Viveza is particularly interesting in that it uses the same U-point technology seen in Nikon Capture NX. The principle is straightforward. Instead of making a selection first and then applying adjustments, you add a 'control point' that includes both the selection parameters and the image adjustments.

In their basic form, these control points have four sliders which appear when the control point is selected. The first slider adjusts the size of the selected area, while three further sliders adjust the brightness, contrast and saturation within that area. There is an extended mode where additional sliders appear for hue, red, green, blue and warmth adjustment, but most tweaks can be accomplished with the standard set.

The 'selections' made by Viveza might be circular in scope, but they're much smarter than that. The areas actually affected will be defined by the tones directly

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under the control point, so that where you place the control point will affect the selection. It's not unlike Photoshop's Background Eraser tool, for example, or you could think of it as a Magic Wand tool, which automatically sets tolerance and feathering levels to produce a natural-looking selection.

It is a nuisance that the control point selections are always circular, though. Much of the time this doesn't matter, but if you're trying to darken a stormy sky evenly across the width of the picture, for example, you might need two or even three control points (top left, top centre, top right) and then juggle their individual sizes and properties to get the desired effect.

On the upside, multiple control points are easy to manage (they're displayed in a list in the panel on the right of the Viveza window) and they interact quite subtly. For example, if you want to shield a particular area from the effect of a nearby control point, you simply add another 'neutral' control point at that spot.

At this point, though, it becomes apparent that you've tried out pretty well all of Viveza's functions. The Photoshop version of this plug-in can work with Photoshop selections, but of course there are no selection tools in Aperture. This makes you wonder if Nik shouldn't perhaps reduce the price of the Aperture version.

In fact there's another, much more pressing reason for doing so: Nikon Capture NX 2. Most will have spotted by now that the U-point technology in Viveza is the same as NX 2's, but the point is that NX 2 costs half as much and is ten times the image-editor that Viveza is.

And although NX 2 is a standalone application rather than a plug-in, there is no functional difference for Aperture users. Both external applications and plug-ins are invoked from the same menu, and both produce standalone Tiff files stacked with the original. Nik Software produces some great plug-ins, and the idea behind Viveza is great. But it's a bit simplistic, and far too expensive to be considered a must-buy.