It's that time of year - winter wants to wind down and spring can't wait to get here. All this anxiousness to get outside and shoot made me think back on a couple things.
One, I remembered what an amazing day I had last summer up on Mount Evans here in Colorado. I spent all day shooting, flying my DJI (successfully at 14,000', I might add) and driving up and down the treacherous, but wonderful road. If you haven't made the trek up there, do it this summer. You won't be disappointed!
The other thing that came to mind was a software suite I used back when I was working at CP+B called Nik. They were filter plugins for Photoshop and they were not cheap. I was mostly only used Silver Efex - and you could get some structure contrast with that tool like nothing else. It was perfect for that super micro-contrasty style. When I left CP+B I also left my access to the software behind.
But today, out of curiosity, I decided to see if the plugins were still being developed. To my surprise I saw that Google bought the suite and is now offering the full set of plugin tools for free for both Mac and PC, and they work with both Lightroom and Photoshop.
The Silver Efex works just as I remember, offering the ability to easily set regional masked adjustments as well as choose from pre-defined looks that you can tune and save to your heart's content. Some of it feels gimmicky, but the structure controls really dig into your image in ways I've never seen any other software do. In addition to Silver Efex the software comes with Analog Efex (mimics film stocks - but I'm not sure anyone can mach VSCO), Color Efex (color correction), Viveza (selective color adjustments), Dfine (strong camera-calibrated noise reduction tool), and Sharpener (damn good sharpening - though nothing beats a high-pass filter in Photoshop, if you ask me).
Anyway, download the suite now that it's free. You'll dig it fo sho.