I’ve covered this topic a few times before on the blog, but as there have been lots of changes recently, I figured it would be time for an update. First I will go through the more popular software, and offer my opinion on each as to how it pertains to Fuji processing. Then I will discuss my current workflow. [Updated for May 2019]

I’m really behind on this post, so apologies. I haven’t really been paying much attention to X-Transformer, as I haven’t been using it that much lately, so I missed the 1.5 update that came out in March. This update changes a couple of things in the software, but the most noticeable is that it adds some lossy compression options and changes the interface a little.

With the recent launch of Luminar Flex and the update of Luminar to 3.1, I’ve been seeing a lot of comments and I've been getting feedback from readers who are confused about the different versions. I have to admit, I was a bit confused myself at first, but I’ve since managed to get a better handle as to the main differences between the two. With that In mind, I will attempt to clear up some of the (yours and mine!) confusion.

Despite being discontinued several years ago, Apple’s Aperture software still worked for the most part with current setups, but that is about to change. Apple has issued a warning that Aperture won’t work with the next version of MacOS after Mojave. 

Today, Skylum Software releases the first major update to Luminar 3. The release brings a couple of new features along with lots of other fixes and tweaks. The two headline features of the new version are Accent AI 2.0 and Raw + Jpeg management. I’ve been trying the beta for a few days and here’s what I found.

Skylum software is having a Black Friday sale, and as I’m a member of their affiliate programme, if you decide to purchase Luminar or Aurora HDR it will help out keeping the lights on here, as there’s a small commission, and as the phrase goes: "every little helps". Here’s some details as to what’s on offer.

I’ve covered the topic of Raw sharpening on my blog many, many times, but every now and then I still get a snarky comment from a viewer or a reader who doesn’t understand how RAW photos work. It is usually along the lines of telling me that I’d be better off “learning to take pictures properly and get them right in camera so they don’t need to be “sharpened”. The thing is though, the reason you need to care about sharpening RAW files actually has nothing to do with whether you captured your photos properly, or whether images are “sharp” in camera or not. It’s actually to do with the way RAW files work.

Today Adobe is holding it’s “Max” conference, and the company officially announced a whole bunch of updates to the various creative cloud apps. I won’t go into everything here, but the ones that interest me the most, are the updates to Lightroom and Photoshop. I’m also pretty interested in the new Premiere Rush.

I realise that I’ve been covering Capture One quite a bit lately, but that’s mainly because of the announcements around Photokina regarding its partnership with Fujifilm. However, there’s lots of other software related news and releases, and I haven’t quite kept up with it all. Skylum, in addition to launching Aurora HDR2019, has also been making some announcements regarding Luminar, all of which are pretty interesting.

While I’ve covered quite a few photo workflow applications here on the blog over the years, especially as it pertains to Fuji processing, one of the applications that I haven’t really dealt with is Alien Skin Exposure. It’s also probably the application I get asked about the most. A new version has just been released, and so I decided to give the trial version a spin, and here are some of my initial findings. This is just a first look and is by no means a comprehensive review.

I have been a bit busy over the past few weeks, so I am a little behind with the announcement of the next version of Aurora HDR from Skylum Software. Also, given that the press release was pretty much covered on every site out there, I didn’t want to post something about it without trying it first. So having played with the beta for a little while now, I made a quick video to give you a run through of the new version.

While there’s no doubt that working with photo workflow software such as Lightroom or Capture One has changed the way most people work with photos, there are still people who prefer the old fashioned way of doing most of their processing in Photoshop. For some, the Bridge/Photoshop workflow is still their preferred method of work. Another method that is sometimes used is to work with the software supplied with your camera as a starting point, and then finish in Photoshop. For those used to working in Lightroom, this approach may appear clunky, but it does have some advantages. Lately I’ve been giving this workflow a try, and here are my thoughts.

I’ve been trying to catalogue a drive full of Raw files going back several years (more on that in a future post), and during the process, I got sidetracked and started playing with some of the older images. I came across one shot that I had taken in Washington DC a few years ago, which I really liked at the time, but now I realise that I had over-edited it originally. I wanted to have another go at it, and so I thought It would be interesting to try it in Luminar, and it would make a good tutorial.

One of the questions that I get regularly from readers and viewers is: “what the difference is between Iridient X-Transformer and Iridient Developer?” If you are considering one of these for converting X-Trans files, it may be confusing for some people as to which one to choose, so here is what I hope will be a simple guide to deciding which software to use.

While we see a renaissance of sorts when it comes to photo editing software, in my opinion, the management side has taken a back seat. If you look at many of the recent developments across newer and updated applications, most of the development has been on the image editing side. Lightroom, for example, has seen only minor changes to the database side of the application in years. There are lots of new technologies out there that would be really useful to photographers if they were all together in one application, and yet, in my opinion, there’s nothing that does everything. At least not yet.