PMA best of show: Nik’s Viveza

If I had to choose best of show at PMA, the top spot would go to Nik Software’s Viveza, a new Photoshop plug-in that performs selective color and tone correction to your images.

The plug-in based around the U Point control technology engineered by Nik and originally employed in Nikon’s Capture NX, which is Nikon’s image editor for its NEF Raw format.

U Point lets you make edits to portions of an image without having to create complex masks or selections, and it’s both extremely powerful and surprisingly simple to use.

And Viveza supports Photoshop’s Smart Filters, which lets you perform non-destructive editing without creating adjustment layers.

The control point technology is the reason a few friends of mine use Capture NX instead of Photoshop for round-tripping images inside an Aperture workflow. When I was working on a Nikon D-SLR reviews last summer, I was blown away with how easy it was to correct images with Capture NX, and, after watching the demo, I can’t wait to get my hands on Viveza.

Viveza is in beta right now, and Nik hopes to ship it in April for $250. It will work with both Photoshop and Photoshop Elements 6. There’s a good video introduction on the Nik site that shows in detail how Viveza does its magic.