Photo Editing, Tutorials, Photography News, and More
This blog covers a range of topics from Lightroom, Photoshop, Capture One, Fujifilm, Canon, Nikon, iPhone Photography, and more. If you want to see more of my actual photography work, visit my Portfolio and Photo Journal blog.
Capture One’s Preview Problem and How to get Around it
I really like Capture One, but I do have one major issue with it which, has been driving me mad. It doesn’t render previews that fully represent what the final output will be like. What do I mean by this? If you are viewing an image set to fit the screen, certain things like sharpening are only approximated, and certain things like aberration correction and fringing aren’t rendered at all. In order to see these properly, you need to view the image at 1:1. There is a way around this, however, but more on that in a minute.
The Best way to use Luminar with Capture One
If you’ve been following this blog for a while now, you probably know that I’m a big fan of Macphun’s Luminar. It works great as a plug-in for Lightroom, but if you’re using Capture One it gets a bit more complicated. While you can use it as an external editor with Capture One, getting it to round-trip properly can be a bit tricky. There is however a simple solution to the problem and that is to use Photoshop as a intermediate.
Picktorial X-Pack First Look
The makers of Picktorial have just introduced a new add-on for the software specifically for Fuji X-Trans shooters. Called “X-Pack”, it brings a set of colour profiles to match the Film Simulation modes. It’s available now from the company’s store as a $15 add on. I’ve been lucky enough to get to test it and I’ve created a little video showing the profiles in action.
Aurora HDR 2018 Coming Soon. Windows Version to Be Released
Macphun has announced that the next version of Aurora HDR is soon to be released (in September) and it will feature some significant changes, including a new interface design, and more importantly, for the first time, a Windows version.
Video: 5 Things I miss about Aperture
Following on from my post the other day about using Aperture again, I created a little video showing the 5 features that I miss the most about using Apple’s discontinued software.
Revisiting Aperture and using Fuji X-Pro 2 Files in Aperture via X-Transformer
As an experiment, and part of an ongoing project, I decided to launch Aperture the other day. It was the first time I have used the application in a long time, and It was an interesting experience. Because it has been so long, and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. The reasons that I wanted to try it out, was that I wanted to see how files from X-Transformer were working in various different applications other than Lightroom. The result was both eye opening and depressing at the same time.
My X-Transformer Guide Updated
I have updated my Iridient X-Transformer Guide with new information to cover the latest release. The new update of the guide (v1.2) covers beta 4 of X-Transformer, and includes details on using the new plug-in as well as the new options for preserving the film simulation modes as colour profiles.
Two Free Presets for Luminar
I’ve been playing around with Luminar a lot lately, and in particular I’ve been using it as an extension to Apple’s photos to quickly process Jpeg Images from my Fuji X-Pro 2. I’ll have more details on this in a future post, but for now, I wanted to share some of the looks I was getting.
Iridient X-Transformer Beta 4 Released
Iridient Digital has released a new version of X-Transformer. The update, which was released last night has a number of improvements and new features, the most significant of which is a new plug-in for Lightroom which will make it easier to send files to the application. It also now has the ability to automatically embed which film simulation you used into the DNG as a corresponding colour profile.
Macphun Luminar Windows Open Beta now available
Luminar, which I’ve reported on and talked about a good bit on this site, is now available as a beta for Windows. The public beta is open to everyone and all you have to do is sign up to try it out.
A Closer Look at Affinity Photo 1.5 for Fuji Raw Processing
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.
Video: Watch me create a HDR Image using Capture One, Aurora HDR and Luminar
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.
Macphun Luminar Neptune Launches
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.
On1 Raw Updated to 2017.5
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.
Luminar as a Nik Software Alternative
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.