Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
While I’ve talked about Affinity photo before at various times, and I’ve briefly covered the application for processing Fuji Raw files, I realised that I haven’t really looked at it in depth. In fact, a reader recently emailed me about it, and it was only then that I realised that I hadn’t explored the application’s RAW processing in detail.
I recently spent some time in Galway city, in the west of Ireland, and while I was there I was taking some photos around the harbour and the railway station. As I was capturing the images, it occurred to me that they had an urban decay feel to them, and I thought they would be perfect for my Industrial Iron set of presets.
It’s been over a week since I stared offering a membership option on Patreon, and I want to thank those who’ve already joined up. I also realised that I didn’t explain it very well the last time I posted about it, so allow me to elaborate a bit.
In this video I take a bracketed exposure that I shot on a Fuji X-Pro 2 and starting with Capture One, I look at the process of creating a HDR using Aurora HDR. I then do some additional editing in Luminar, before bringing the final image back into Capture One.
This may seem like a relatively obtuse question at first but bear with me. I found myself wondering if people actually consider this when reading some online commentary. Who is your audience? Obviously, if you’re a professional, then you are shooting for you clients. But for amateurs and enthusiasts: do you take photos for family or friends? Do you take them for yourself? Do you take pictures for the general public or certain interest groups?
I was in Galway yesterday, which was the longest day of the year, and I wanted to capture the sunset over Galway bay looking out to the Atlantic. As it was the longest day, it was kind of a special sunset, marking the end of the lengthening evenings and the start of the long march back to winter. Unfortunately it was cloudy, but there was still some nice light, and the beach at Salthill in Galway is dramatic in and of itself.
As I mentioned last week, I had recently borrowed a friends Nikon D800 to try it out. I’ve long had a D700 and it is one of my favourite cameras of all time. While the D800 is getting old now, and a generation behind, I was still curious to use it. Shooting it was an interesting experience and I thought I would share a few random thoughts on using it. So, in no particular order, here are some of my findings.
In this video I take a look at using X-Transformer and Lightroom for Processing Fuji X-Trans files from an X-Pro 2. I walk through the process from the start to finish, and I demonstrate some of the techniques that I have in my eBook guide on using X-Transformer.
Macphun have just released a new and updated version of Luminar. The update features some big new features, as well as a lot of little improvements. I’ve had a chance to use the beta version for a few days, and there are some interesting new features in the application.
I am a little late on this one, with WWDC over a week ago now, but I wanted to share some thoughts on the keynote and the announcements. In particular, I wanted to have a look at them from the point of view of a creative professional and a photographer. I’ve been an Apple fan for a long time, and I love using my Mac and iOS devices, despite occasional frustrations. Recently, I had begun to question Apple’s commitment to both the Mac Platform and creative Professionals. After this years WWDC, I no longer have any doubts.
I’m happy to announce that I’ve just launched a Patreon Membership Page. For a while now, people have been asking me for a way to support the site and the things that I do, and while I’ve had a great response to the eBooks and Presets that I publish, they’re not for everyone. aWith that in mind, I wanted to create a way for anyone who wants to support my photography writing, and the research that I do, in a reasonable way.
Recently I was going through some old blog posts, and I came across a Panorama image that I really liked. Unfortunately, I had lost the original high res versions, and all I had left was the low res one that was posted to the website. However, I managed to find the original Raw files that I used to create the image, and so in this video I show you how I re-created the Panorama in Lightroom and Photoshop
I recently had the opportunity to borrow a friend’s Nikon D800. While the D800 is an older camera now at this stage, I was keen to try it out, as I love my D700 and I wanted to see how it performed. I had borrowed it before, but not for as long. The lat time I had it I had shot a very short sequence of video, and I was impressed. This time I wanted to shoot a bit more video and see how good it was, more for curiosity than anything.
Yesterday, On1 released a major update to their On1 Raw software, that they are marketing as a Lightroom alternative. The new release adds some much-needed features and changes a few things in the software. It is a fairly major update, and I did a little testing after it was announced. Here are some initial findings.
I’m happy to announce that my latest set of Lightroom Presets, Industrial Iron, are now available. I teased these a few weeks ago, and they’re now ready for launch. This Idea for Industrial Iron came about when I was processing some images of a German townscape that I took on a dull and rainy day. I had wanted to create a look that was industrial, and spoke of urban decay, and this is what I came up with.
Last week Google announced that it would no longer update the Nik software suite that it acquired some time ago. The Nik collection has long been a staple of many photographers over the years and it offered some excellent tools for both creating black and white images with Silver Efex Pro, and also for enhancing colour images with Colour Efex. I have been using the software since it was owned by an independent company, and I even paid the full price for it back in the day. While I’m sad to see it go, I hadn’t been using it for a while anyway, as my main go-to plug in now is MacPhun’s Luminar.
When Capture One was recently updated to 10.1 they made some significant changes to the way X-Trans files are supported. I have been in a bit of a quandary as to what to do about my Capture One X-Trans guide. I originally wrote this quite some time ago now, and it was several versions ago. I have kept updating it, but it was getting a bit messy. I am planning to do a completely new version, for just 10.1, and structuring the guide differently. However, I didn’t want to leave existing readers hanging either. With that in mind I’ve created a supplement for 10.1 and it is included free with the existing guide.
I’ve been working with the excellent AuroraHDR from MacPhun for some time now, and slowly I’ve been building a collection of presets to use with the software. I’m delighted to say that they’re now available. The pack includes a collection of 22 presets. The included looks are designed to cover a wide variety of styles, and include more traditional, artistic style looks as well as more natural looking styles. The pack also contains some presets designed to work with single image HDR files, and also some black and white HDR looks.
