Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve undoubtedly heard of Adobe’s “generative fill” for photoshop. The feature, which uses Adobe’s firefly AI engine to add AI-generated imagery to your photos or artwork directly in photoshop. Now that it is no longer test software, I wanted to share my experience, and address a couple of big issues with generative fill.
Earlier in the summer I spent some time in New York City and I took various photos while there, although I’ve been a little behind in editing them. As part of the trip, we spent some time in Brooklyn and I got some good shots, but I am only getting around to properly editing them now. I thought this might make a good video, so I recorded a session of editing 4 of these using Capture One.
DXO labs today announced the release of the latest version of its popular Nik Collection software suite. While it might sound like a point release, it actually contains some significant updates and marks a milestone for the software.
I’ve been busy processing a backlog of photos in Lightroom recently, and while working with the software, I noticed a couple of things that I do, of which people may not be aware. These are pretty small tips, and you may already be aware of both of these, but if not, I hope they will be helpful to your workflow in the future. So, without further ado…
Earlier this year, I had a chance to visit two of the cities I’ve always wanted to see: Copenhagen and Stockholm. Ever since visiting Oslo a few years ago, I’ve really wanted to see the rest of the region and Copenhagen and Stockholm were on the bucket list. So, when I got the chance to see both of these cities, I jumped at the chance. This wasn’t going to be a strictly photographic trip - I was there with my wife on a business trip, but it was still an opportunity to get to visit these wonderful cities.
The Fujifilm Fujinon 16-80mm lens is one I’ve wanted for a long time, but it has been surprisingly difficult to get hold of here in Ireland. Ever since it came out, the standalone version has been back-ordered, and it was only really available here as part of a kit. I finally managed to get one second hand a couple of months ago, and I’ve been using it a lot since, including taking it on several trips. So, I wanted to do a non-technical review of this lens for those who might be interested.
A while ago I made a video on how to add white borders to an image for instagram using Lightroom classic’s print module. When I made that video someone asked if you could do the same on the mobile versions of Lightroom. It turns out you can, and it’s actually super easy to do.
I’m a bit late on this one, but DXO, earlier this week, announced Nik Collection 6. The latest release includes updates to 5 of the individual apps, as well as overall workflow improvements to the whole suite.
A while ago, I wrote an article on this blog my perspective on Capture One vs Lightroom, as I regularly use both applications. I tried to present a balanced opinion on the advantages and disadvantages of both. I’ve updated that article since the first version of it came out, and since I last updated it, there have been some significant changes in both Capture One and Lightroom. I feel that these changes require a whole new discussion, and therefore a whole new blog post.
Today Adobe released the latest round of photography product updates, including all the versions of Lightroom, camera raw, etc. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to concentrate on Lightroom Classic 12.3. While this sounds like it should be a minor update given that it’s a point release, it is anything but. This could end up being one of the most substantial updates in years, based on just one of the features in the software
As an experiment, I asked Chat GPT to write a complete blog post. I asked for ideas on street photography and it suggested street photography ethics, which I then asked it to write a full blog post on. I'm sharing the unedited post as it was written by Chat GPT, along with some thoughts on the result. It's fascinating to see what an AI language model can create, and I invite you to read the post and discover what Chat GPT came up with!
DXO labs have released a new version of their noise reduction and raw preprocessing software, DXO PureRAW 3. Now in its third iteration, the software includes several new features and changes over the previous version.
I feel like this blog has turned into a long series of me apologising for not updating the blog. In some sense it’s almost become comedic, and if it wasn’t such a pain from my point of view I’d be laughing more (although I’m doing my best to try and see the funny side). I’ve had a crazy couple of months. So much so that even though it’s nearly March as I write this, it still feels like early January. I keep thinking Christmas was last week, not two months ago. So what’s been happening? Well, a bit of a rollercoaster to be honest.
In this post, I express my frustration with Capture One (the company, not the software), regarding recently announced changes to their licensing model for perpetual licences that will take effect in 2023. I express disappointment with this change, as I feel that it makes perpetual licences unattractive and forces customers to switch to a subscription, which I previously criticised for being overpriced. I also feel that the company's timing of the announcement, after the upgrade cycle for Capture One 23 had ended, left some customers feeling duped.
DxO has just released a new batch of Optics Modules. This latest release includes 1,693 new modules, providing unparalleled corrections for a variety of popular camera models and lenses. Some of the camera models that are now supported by these new Optics Modules include the Canon EOS R6 Mark II, the Fujifilm X-T5, and the Sony A7R V
With the new year already begun I thought I’d take a brief pause to look back on the last year in terms of photography. Photographically speaking, 2022 was a difficult year for me. I didn’t take nearly as many photographs as I would have liked, but I ended up taking quite a bit of landscape photography, a genre of which I haven’t really done a lot. Check out this post to see a review of some of my favourite photos and photographic exploits from last year.
Just a quick note to update you on some updates from DXO labs. They have announced a special discount for the holidays and also the addition of new DxO Optics Modules for the company’s software range, and the release of Photo Lab 6.1
There’s an old axiom about never telling people your plans publicly until they’re set in stone, and I recently made that mistake when I shared a blog post a little while ago about what I had planned for this website. I had mentioned that I wasn’t happy with Squarespace, and that I was planning to move back to WordPress. Well, you may have noticed that nothing has actually happened….
