When I took this photo I was focused on the design that the barista had produced. I was trying to underexpose it to make the background less obvious and distracting but when I got it into Aperture I realized that I had a chance to make the background black. I opened the image in Nik Viveza, (Viveza is the colour version of Nik Silver Efex) and began to work to darken the image. The Nik image editing suite is an amazing piece of software that is so easy to use and yet is very versatile. You set a circle that you determine the size of down on the image and whichever tones are under the centre of the circle will be affected by the controls that you set. Even if there are other tones/colours under the circle they will not be affected by your changes. It really works wonderfully and you don’t end up with hard edges as so often happens when you use brushes to edit a photo. I worked my way around the cup until I had only the rim and the coffee floating in a pool of blackness.

For other photos from the coffee shop shoot check here and here.

-Russell Berg