DXO Photo Lab has been awarded TIPA’s 2021 professional photo editing software award. The award is primarily for the applications’ impressive “Deep Prime” noise reduction software. I’ve covered this before a few times and it’s really impressive technology.

When I announced that I was closing my store earlier this month I was blown away by the support from everyone who reads the blog, and those who have bought content from me in the past. Since it closed, I’ve had lots of requests from people who still wanted to get some of my eBooks or Styles and Presets. So, I’m trying out Gumroad to make some of these available.

I just wanted to post a quick follow up on the news that I am closing my store. I have received a lot of well-wishing, and I want to thank everyone, but there has also been a little bit of confusion that I wanted to clear up.

This isn't a decision I have taken lightly, but I have decided to close my digital download store. I will cease selling content on Thursday, September 10th. The website will remain online until the end of September to allow anyone who may have made purchases to download and back them up. After that, the store will be taken offline.

I was trying to write the title for this post and make it not sound like a spam ad, which is what I thought when I first saw this, but its true. Adobe is offering two months off for creative cloud subscribers to help creatives deal with the current global situation. I read about this on a tweet, and I thought it was a joke or a scam, but it was from a reliable source, and I tried it and it works (at least it did a few days ago).

Luminar 4 has received its first major update, and the new version adds some new functions to the Sky Replacement filter, as well as a collection of under-the-hood fixes and enhancements. Here’s a breakdown of what’s new in the update

The next couple of weeks are going to be pretty busy for photo software. We’ve recently had plenty of teasing about Luminar 4, as well as an announcement of sorts about the next version of Capture One. So what can you expect over the next little while?

A little while ago I wrote a post on how I couldn’t understand Canon’s decision to remove 24p from their newest cameras. 24p is considered a standard around the world, and many of Canon’s cameras became so popular for video precisely because they allowed users to shoot in 24p, so it was inexplicable to me that the company had chosen to remove such a key feature. I wasn’t the only one, and there was a wide and loud backlash from users. Well, Canon listened, and has announced that it would be adding 24p to several recently released cameras via firmware.

There’s been a good bit of photo software news over the past week so rather than doing lots of separate posts, I thought I’d cover it here in one section. The headlines: Skylum shows off AI Portrait enhancer coming in Luminar 4, Phase One announced a new offer for Capture One, Exposure announced some details of Exposure 5, and a useful piece of software for Sony and Olympics shooters who want to use Pixel Shift.

I’ve finally gotten around to something I should have done a log time ago. I have finally upgraded the graphics card in my Mac Pro. I had been owing the original and extremely bad (by today’s standards) ATI 5770 and its paltry 1gb or ram. Amazingly enough I managed to get by all these years, but it was becoming increasingly problematic, so I finally ordered a replacement.

Just a quick notice! I’ve created a new Facebook Group where you can discuss any of the things you see here on the blog, or if you use any of my styles or presets, you can share photos you’ve created using these. You can also use the form to ask questions and get help from other members of the community. 

I’m having a summer sale on all of my Lightroom Presets and on my Capture One styles. There’s up to between 20% and 50% off on various presets and styles. I’ve been running this through July, and now it will continue until the end of August. If you’re looking for some great Capture One Styles or Lightroom Presets, here’s a chance to get them at a good discount.

I’m currently running a trial to test the idea of enabling review on my store. The reason I haven’t done this in the past is that it is a bit risky, with a small store like mine. However, for the next month I’m trialing it on a select few products to see if it works, and if it does, they will stay on, and if not, I’ll turn the review system back off again.

I’ve released a minor update to my X-Transformer guide that addresses some of the recent changes in the application. This is a free update to anyone who had previously bought the guide. 

In case you missed it, I’m having a summer sale on all of my Lightroom Presets and on my Capture One styles. There was actually a little problem with my store and it wasn’t displaying all of my Capture One styles for some reason, but this is fixed now. There’s up to between 20% and 50% off on various presets and styles. Here are some examples:

Skylum has just released an update to Luminar Flex, the plug-in version of Luminar. The update brings the second generation of Accent AI filter to Luminar flex as well as a couple of other updates. Here’s what’s new:

After an extended period of not being available through Apple’s MacOS App Store, Lightroom has made a return. The changes to the Mac App Store that came about when Mojave was released last year, allowed Adobe to bring the software back along with the return of several other high profile apps, such as Microsoft Office, It’s available now for any compatible Mac running 10.8 or later. It should be noted that this version is Lightroom Desktop (I.e. the version based on the mobil eversion of Lightroom) and not Lightroom Classic. 

I’ve just released an updated version of my Fuji Jpeg book. This is a relatively minor update, and is focussed on fixing the language in some places, as well as updating the references mentioned in it to reflect things that have changed since the guide was first written, such as the arrival of newer Fuji cameras, changes to Lightroom etc. the new version number is 1.2, and you can find a complete list of changes below.