Getting to grips with Nik's
Mike McNamee talks to Aled Oldfield fswpp about almost a year with Nik
Software
This feature has been a long time in the making. Casting about for a
full-time professional with a busy studio and no prior experience with Nik
Filters, McNamee ended up in discussions with Tony Corbell (Nik evangelist
from the USA), Aled Oldfield fswpp and some of the Nik software's European
team. The brief was simply, to use Nik on a regular basis, keep notes,
present the results and try to get under the hood of Color Efex Pro 3.0 in
particular.
ABOVE
Note in the original, with all the RAW sliders at their default settings
that detail is evident in the dark jeans and the leather sofa.
ABOVE
The graded shot shows warmed and more tanned skin tones, but there is little
affect on either the jeans or sofa.
MAIN PICTURE:
In the finished shot the crop has been tightened, Glamour Glow has been
applied selectively and the surroundings have been darkened to eliminate
distracting detail. The effect is the bring Katy forward in the image with
her blond hair aglow and the composition concentrates the viewer's eye onto
her face – a very pretty girl in gorgeous light, no wonder she (and her mum)
were pleased with it!
This feature makes an interesting foil to that of Sofie
Louca and Paul Kariolides on the previous pages. Their's is a more
adventurous approach for a quite different clientele to Aled's (who tend to
be more conservative). Typically the difference may be summarised as 'the
images the bride likes and those that her parents like' – they are rarely
the same thing. A recurring theme seems to be of people asking for
easy-going, reportage-style wedding shoots but then being dismayed when they
find there are no formals, especially group shots, often because they have
asked for it to be so! Regardless of how avant guard your style of
photography, good craftsmanship remains vital, you have to be able to create
a sparkling quality portrait that stands out simply because it is so
beautifully crafted. You may choose to use a conservative style rarely, but
you should be able to do so when appropriate. It is interesting that Sofie
and Paul choose not to use plug-in filters and are rightly critical of blown
highlights from a number of third-party plug-ins (banding is also an issue
Ed.). This was an identical criticism to Aled's, who works the original file
to prevent that loss of control. Both approaches are valid; as ever in
photography, there are many ways to achieving a signature style, our job at
Professional Imagemaker is simply to keep pushing good work before you!
The Bleach Bypass effect, which is available in the Nik Color Efex Pro is
very popular in the advertising, fashion and film industry at the moment and
we note that Yervant's images in his winning panel at the AIPP Australian
Wedding Photographer of the Year are manipulated in this style (see
http://www.aipp.com.au/aipphome. php?ID=414&cat=APPA&A=).
The result is characterised by a lowered saturation and an enhanced edge
effect, a little like over-sharpening. Sofie Louca has created the same
effect from scratch in the previous feature, so you have a number of
choices.
Nik Filters have been earning professional photographers additional income
for some time. The software is capable, in good hands, of adding a signature
style to an image or even an entire album. There is a difference between
images that you might create for a competition and those which the bride's
mother will approve of – we add that as a health warning at the start of
this feature. Time and time again photographers have offered images with
'advanced' techniques, styles and features, only to discover that their
clients have rather conservative tastes! It is against this background that
Aled has been using Nik filters to enhance his portraiture and wedding
photography, but in quite a restrained way for much of the time.
The Nik Color Efex filters provide 52 basic effects but the actual number is
boosted by, for example, Monday Morning containing an additional five
variants. With 52 filters and over 250 effects found in Color Efex Pro 3.0
you can perform high quality retouching, color correction and endless
creative enhancements to your photographs. This is actually a bit of a
problem; the enthusiast has time to try many options out, the busy
professional can barely afford that time, particularly at the height of the
season. Aled, for example, has typically only been using Nik Software for
between two and 10 images per wedding, in a wedding shoot running up to 800
images. This is some way from the enthusiasts' more scatter-gun approach.
With a long background in print laboratory management and an almost
unequalled experience of colour grading at speed, Aled's light-box in either
Lightroom or Adobe Bridge is a joy to behold, a seamless array of equally
graded thumbnails! For this reason we were anxious to learn and measure how
his grading varied between an 'album ready' image and a 'ready for Nik'
image. To this end we had Aled provide both his work files and the original
RAW captures.
One of the gratifying things about the data analysis is that Aled has,
completely independently, arrived at the same numerical skin-tone data, and
position on the graph, as we found ourselves when analysing Martin Sellar's
data from several years ago. Martin, with an experience in colour printing
to match Aled's, had shown Caucasian brides a number of pictures and arrived
at an area in the Lab graph where the favoured skin tones resided. In
essence this is slightly more saturated and slightly more yellow than
average Caucasian skin (see the graph).
Analysis of Aled's Nik-ready files shows that he has slightly lifted the
saturation and that, most importantly, he has pegged back his highlight
values to 237RGB points so that the Nik filters have something to work on.
This can be accomplished with the original exposure or by pulling up the
'recovery' slider in the ACR interface. Although Nik filters have a
highlight slider in order to recover some of the highlight burn out, the
default setting can lose a vast amount of detail and so effects have to be
carefully painted in to avoid this, a problem that newcomers to the filter
plugin seem to have trouble with.
ABOVE:
This graph has been published before but will bear a repeat explanation. It
plots the hue and saturation values of human skin (almost all races and
ethnicities) at a constant 60% Lab Lightness value. It is a Lab plot, red to
green along the horizontal axis, yellow to blue down the vertical axis and,
because skin is mainly red, only the upper right quadrant of the graph is
shown. The radial lines are constant hue (colour) measured in degrees around
the colour wheel. The contour lines are constant saturation – zero at the
graph origin (ie no colour = neutral grey) and progressively more saturated
as you move out towards the upper right of the graph.
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