I am a huge fan of Nik Collection professional photographic tools and have only Google to thank for making them really affordable when they bought over the company. It began with the Viveza plug-in that made local adjustments possible (Lightroom offers a similar tool by way of the Local Adjustment Brush but early implementation isn’t nearly as smooth as Nik’s U Point technology. I’m writing this post not to review this tool but to highlight a problem I’ve encountered sometime back (visibility pronounced under the right conditions) with the Viveza tool, and how support staff resolved the (annoying) problem in less than 48 hours, over two emails.
The problem I’m talking about are the spiral artifacts after I’ve applied local brightness and contrast adjustments to the white and red coloured part of the helicopter body. You can see the spiral patterns (“banding” being the technical term to describe this occurrence in digital images) radiating from the chopper to the rest of the image.
Because the raw converter (not Lightroom) I used to process this photo doesn’t have local adjustment capability, I exported the image to 8-bit JPEG before making final adjustments using Viveza 2 as a Paintshop Pro plug-in. There’s no banding when I applied the same editing using a 16-bit image file — yay! If you’re noticing the strange white halo around the helicopter, that is the result of a more aggressive than necessary editing done intentionally as an attempt to provoke banding but there just wasn’t any!
Photo of Brunei Shell Petroleum’s Sikorsky S-92 SAR helicopter
