Over on my Photo Journal I posted some images I took recently while out in the local parks here after a rain storm. I had taken these with my old Canon 5d Mark 1 and I processed them using the QuckNeg presets in my QuickLux 2 pack. This kind of deep green, overcast look is exactly what I was trying to create when I was developing these looks.

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've been using a defunct Pantone Huey Pro to calibrate my display, for pretty much as long as I can remember. While the device hasn't been officially supported for a while, it had continued to function until recently. Since El Capitan came out, the software hasn't been working properly, and my display has been slowly drifting. On top of that, somewhere along the way, the gamma got screwed up, which I didn't realise. So the upshot of this is that my screen was too bright, and so I was outputting my images too dark. 

Just a quick update on X-Pro 2 raw support. Another application has added support fro X-Pro 2 raw files. This time it's Mylio. If you haven't seen Mylio before, it's quite an interesting application, that has great promise. It is a photo management application, which also features some raw conversion, but it's main feature is its ability to sync across multiple platforms, including iOS. 

Here's a little distraction for a rainy Friday. I was taking some photos in the Stephen's Green park in the centre of Dublin yesterday, and as I was lining up a different shot, I noticed some commotion in the lake behind me. There was a guy there feeding the seagulls, and they were getting quite frenetic. So I shot off a sequence on high speed with my D700. 

I’ve been covering different ways to get Lightroom and photos to work together on the blog for a little while. In one of my previous posts I showed a way to sort of sync between the two applications. A simpler method is to create an export preset to send images straight to Photos from Lightroom. There are two ways to do this and I’ll discuss them both in the following post.

I recently decided to get a new camera strap for my old film camera. By new, I really mean: "one in the first place" as it has been without a strap for some time since I "borrowed" the one that came with it for something else. I wanted something that fitted the retro nature of the camera, and I also wanted something fairly minimal. So I decided to try and have a look on Etsy, and what I found was a lovely piece of hand made craftsmanship.

Here's a very quick Lightroom tip for you. One of the frustrating things about the way Lightroom's preview system works is that it only generates previews when you tell it to, usually upon import. As soon as you make any changes to an image, the preview for that image is lost. In order to make sure you can keep browsing through your library speedily, it's important to periodically re-build previews.

I never know how to start these Street Photo diary posts. Should I come up with some philosophical observation on the society that I'm documenting? Should I talk about the gear that I used? Should I wax lyrical about the importance of this or that photographic ideology? I just don't know. At the end of the day, much of the images that I take for these street photo diary series are shots I took for me, because I like some aspect of the scene, or I see a story unfolding that looks like it could be interesting.

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...