Here is a picture of Catie. To be honest, we were thrilled when we saw this image. Catie is sharp, her eyes are shining an the background is softly blurred so Catie is just popping our from the background.

This is the image after some quick edits in Apple's Aperture 2.

Viveza from Nik software is a plug-in that works with both Aperture and Photoshop. The first change was to lower the background level so that Catie will stand out even more. There was special care to lower the brightness of the sky just above her head.

Next, we slightly increased the color saturation in her t-shirt; its a warm color and it visually draws her closer.

The final changes were to her face. On her eyes, we slightly lightened and desaturated the whites being careful not to create the 'glowing orbs' can can happen if you overdo it. We slightly increased the color saturations of her pupils, but there was absolutely no reason to do much here. We also slightly increased the saturation on her lips.

It turns out that Viveza is a great way to lower the sheen that we picked up from the fill-in flash. We selected the normal skin tones and brightened them a bit, mostly to give her a bit more separation from the darkened background. We then selected the brighter areas and slightly darkened them. The effect is subtle and doesn't result in a flat 'pancake' effect that you can see from some photoshop solutions.

All in all, Viveza is proving to be a useful tool for subtle changes.