Beautiful day in Toronto, temperature in the mid 20s, not a cloud in the sky. On days like this my wife and I have taken tolong walks, getting to know the Toronto neighbourhood and one of our favorite destinations is the Distillery District. The Distillery is a series of Victorian red-brick buildings, formerly the Gooderham and Worts whisky distillery, and now home to around 70 cultural and retail establishments, where this is always something going on. This weekend for example is the Sing festival, Canada’s premier capella singing event.

Street signs at Gooderham and Worts, formerly the largest distillery in Canada, Distillery District, Toronto , Ontario, Canada

Panasonic Lumix, 1/400th @ f5.6m ISO 200

Gooderham and Worts, formerly the largest distillery in Canada, Distillery District, Toronto , Ontario, Canada

Nikon D3s, 24-70 f2.8 lens at 70mm, 1/400th @ f8 ISO 200, hand held

Most of my non-sport images now get processed using either the Lightroom or Photoshop raw conversion engine (these are actually identical), and many then get additional processing using various filters from the NIK software suite. The most common filters that I use are the Detail Extractor and the Pro Contrast filters, and every image that is published, either electronically or in print is sharpened using Sharpener Pro 3. Sport images don’t generally go through this level of processing due to time constraints – I am usually transmitting images withing a very short time scale so very little post-processing is done.

Distillery District, Toronto, Canada Distillery District

Raw processed in Photoshop at default settings

Distillery District, Toronto, CanadaDitillery District

Post processed using detail extractor and pro contrast in NIK software

The complete bundle of NIK software, now owned by Google can be had for the remarkable price of just $149, and for that you get Dfine® 2.0, Viveza® 2, HDR Efex Pro™ 2, Color Efex Pro™ 4 Complete Edition, Silver Efex Pro™ 2, and Sharpener Pro™ 3.0. In the coming weeks I will be explaining in detail how I use different aspects of the collection. In fact I don’t use all of them. I do use Dfine for light noise reduction (if an image requires a lot of work on noise I will still use Noise Ninja,) Viveza if an image requires a lot of local control, Color Efex on nearly every image, Silver Efex for every black and white conversion, and Sharpener Pro on every image.