I am in the process of writing my third Fuji X-Trans guide. This one will be a compressive guide to working with Iridient Developer. It's actually turning out to be the biggest one of these guides yet, and I go into a good bit of detail on how to use the software, and cover workflows for working with Iridient Developer and Lightroom. However, as I've been writing this, I keep thinking about some of the questions that I often get asked by email about using one converter over another. 

Here’s another quick tip about Affinity Photo. When I first wrote about Affinity Photo, one f the questions I got from many people was: “Can you use Photoshop Plugins with it?” The answer, you may be pleased to know is a yes. I’ve tried the Nik suite (which is now free) and they all work perfectly well in Affinity Photo. There is one difference that I’ve noticed, and it’s important to be aware of it if you’re planning on using plug-ins in the software.

I briefly covered Affinity Photo in a previous post, and it is an excellent Photoshop alternative. I've been using it more and more lately, and that includes using it in conjunction with Lightroom as an external editor. This is pretty easy to set up but there are a few limitations unfortunately. However, there are significant advantages to using the software in lieu of Photoshop. In this post I'll show you how to set up Affinity Photo to work as an external editor, and I'll discuss some of the limitations and advantages of using Affinity Photo with Lightroom.

I’m a bit late with this news, and if you read any photography blogs on the internet, you’ve probably seen this already, but Google has decided to make the excellent Nik collection available for free. The software, which is a collection of 7 plug-ins for Photoshop, Lightroom or the discontinued Aperture.

I came across an interesting photo editing app in the Mac app store the other day. I’d seen it come up in the suggestions a few times and I’d even bookmarked it to come back to and have a look at later. I finally got around to trying it the other day, and I’m really impressed by the application. It’s called Polarr Photo editor, and it’s just $19.99. It’s available for Windows too, but in this short first look, I’m only talking about the mac version (as that’s all I’ve used)

The latest update to Iridient Developer was announced yesterday and it adds partial support for Fuji X-Pro 2 files. Currently it only supports uncompressed raw files from Fuji's new camera. The update also adds some other bug fixes and improvements.

Instagram has finally added what I'm sure is probably the most requested feature: multiple account support. With the latest version of the app on both iOS and Android, you can now have more than one account (you can now have up to 5). You can also easily switch between them and post to multiple accounts as well. 

If you haven't come across it before, Affinity Photo is a Photoshop competitor from Serif labs, the same people who brought us the excellent Affinity Designer (an illustrator competitor). The software got a lot of attention when it was launched, and Apple named it the best Mac App of 2015. With this quick first look, I'm going to talk about my general impressions of using it, and I'm not going to go too in-depth, butI'll follow this up in a little while with a full review.

I opened Capture One this morning to find a new update in the update notification panel. If you’re a Capture One Pro 9 user, 9.0.3 is now available.

It seems to be the season for updates. Hot on the heels of Capture One yesterday, Adobe has announced updates to many applications in its creative suite including a major new version of Photoshop. 

I had a nice little surprise waiting for me when I opened Capture One this morning. A dialog popped up letting me know that a major new version has been released, Capture Pro 9. It’s available now, for the upgrade price of €99 if you’re a Capture One 7 or 8 user. There are some big new features in this release, including a brand new processing engine. I’ve just upgraded my copy, and I’m going through it now. Once I’ve had a chance to play around I’ll have a more detailed report, but in the mean time, here are some of the key new features (from their website)

Here's a really useful tip I came across over the weekend. While I don't use Apple photos that much, other than for syncing with my iPhone and other devices, it is handy for that very purpose. Because your photos library is the default repository for most imaging apps on iOS, if you want to get photos into an application on your iPhone or iPad it's useful to put them into Photos on the mac and let it sync across. Importing is easy enough, you just drag photos into ...well, photos. However, there's no way to import directly into photos from other applications such as Lightroom. Fortunately there's now a work around. Sort of.

Apple rolled out an update for Yosemite yesterday, and part of that update featured a minor update to Photos for Mac. This was primarily a bug fix release, but one of the improvements listed is more reliable syncing. I’ve talked about in the past briefly about the issues that I’ve been having with syncing on Photos, namely that it stops intermittently and you have to re-start the application or the iOS photos app.

As I’m sure any iPhone, iPad or Mac owner out there knows, Apple held its annual WWDC conference yesterday. Among the many things it showed off was the next version of OS X, called El Capitan, which will focus on performance and user interface improvements. While some highlights were revealed at the show, the presentation didn’t show all the features, and one of those that didn’t make the keynote was an update to Photos for the Mac.

If you use Photos for mac as well as on an iOS device, you may have come across an issue where Photos syncs some of your images and then stops. If this is happening to you there is actually a pretty easy fix.