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've written a few posts lately about ways to speed up Lightroom, and there's one more that may seem counterintuitive at first. If you have a lot of develop module presets installed, it can slow down Lightroom. It doesn't just slow down Lightroom in the Develop Module either, it slows it down the whole application. Even if you're just in the Library. I had written about this before, and I had thought that this "bug" was fixed ages ago. On an official forum, an Adobe rep said that this was to be fixed in Lightroom 6, but it still seems to be an issue.

Having released quite a few premium Lightroom presets over the last few years, I thought I'd take some time to give you an insight into my process for creating them. It's not as straightforward as it might seem. When I stopped to think about it the other day, I realised that it's actually quite an interesting process, so I decided to write it all down. So what follows is a rough guide to the way I create presets for Lightroom, and the various steps involved.

A while ago I made a set of presets for Fuji users which are based on the Fuji film simulation colour profiles as provided by Adobe. these presets are basically just a quick way to set the colour profile by selecting a preset rather than having to go to the camera calibration panel and select the profile there. They also have the advantage of allowing you to set the profiles on import, or allowing you to quickly apply a profile to multiple images at once.

While yesterday's Apple event didn't contain a huge amount of announcements, there are a couple of things that were announced or released that may be of interest to photographers. There's the obvious introduction of the iPhone SE and the new smaller iPad Pro, but there are a also few updates in the just released El Capitan update that are also important. 

If you're curious to see how the new Sony A6300 images look , you can now try them out for yourself. Both Lightroom and Capture One have added raw support for the new camera, and there are now a couple of places where you can download sample raw files. Here are the samples that I've found so far...

Late last week there was something of a blog storm over a video photographer Matt Granger posted about his experiences with Sony’s customer service. If you haven’t seen it already check it out. Basically he had a terrible time getting customer service for his professional Sony cameras. After he posted the video, many of those in the photographic community who also use Sony products chimed in with their own similar stories of Sony’s poor customer service. While I haven’t had to deal with Sony’s customer service here on for any of their Photography products, I too have heard the stories, and have had to deal with the company for other issues.

Phase one has just release Capture One 9.1. The new release includes a number of new features as well as support for some new cameras. Notably absent though is support for the Fuji XPro2. According to the release notes here's what's new:

Today is St. Patricks Day, our national holiday here in Ireland. If there’s one day that’s synonymous with Ireland around the world it’s St. Patricks Day. So in celebration of St. Patricks Day and the greens of Ireland, I’ve put together a selection of “Green” images over on my Streets ofDublin website for your enjoyment, as well as a little essay on what green means to me!

Adobe has just released the latest version of Lightroom. Version 2015.1 for CC users, or 6.5 for standalone users brings bug fixes and new camera support. Unfortunately there is still no mention of the improved Fuji X-Trans rendering promised by Adobe last June.

I’m happy to announce that my next set of Lightroom Presets, QuickLUX 2 is now available. QuickLUX 2 is a sequel to the popular QuickLUX set of presets that started out on Aperture, and became one of my first, and most popular Lightroom sets.

In keeping with my earlier post today, I wanted to share some of the other projects I'm working on. Specifically in terms of the e-book guides I've published recently. I currently have two guides out for Processing X-Trans files in Lightroom and Capture One respectively. I'm currently working on a third guide as well as some updates. 

I’ve been busy working on my March set of Lightroom Presets, and they’re nearly ready. I’m really happy with how these are turning out, so I wanted to share some of the testing with you. Basically, the next set will be a sequel to QuickLux. Unimaginatively called QuickLux 2, it will, like the first set of QuickLux presets, include some of my personal artists interpretation of negative, and transparency films.

If you're using Capture one and you're used to using other applications such as Lightroom, you may have noticed that there is one control missing in Capture One's set of adjustments. That control is "Black Levels" . However, while there is no direct "Black Level" control in Capture one, there are actually several ways you can adjust the black levels in the software. Here are three methods that I currently use.

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)