A couple of weeks ago I discovered a piece of software for manipulating photos with exact precision, that I had never come across before. Nik's Viveza 2 is a wonderfully simple tool to bring the most out of your images.
I am very excited by it as I will want to improve the final shots of my trip to China when I come back in September. So to test this software I created a simple render from maya...
The text uses an ambient occlusion material and the three balls are using a car paint material, both are mental ray materials. The light was setup using an HDRI I pulled from my buddy Rob, who i'm sure won't mind =) and applied it to a IBL dome. The final render was at 720p and these are the results...
1) The original - straight from Maya
2) The edit - from Viveza 2
The results to my eye, are quite staggering. I was able to ramp up the colour and contours of the balls individually and then the whole scene using a circle border which gave it that soft vignette round the corners. I love this tool and will probably be using it for a long time. If you've had positive or negative experiences with it I'd like to know.
