Christmas is nearly here, and I wanted to finish off the year with one more Street Photo diary post. I’ve enjoyed doing this series, and I hope to do more of it next year, but I thought a Christmas themed edition would be somewhat appropriate. 

Just a quick reminder in case you missed it the other day. I’m having a Christmas sale on my digital download store. Because it’s coming up to Christmas, I’m offering 50% off everything in the store. So you can get everything from my ebooks to my Lightroom presets at half price until the end of the year

Read on for details...

One of the things that I love to do for my writing and blogging is to use small and useful little apps from independent developers. I use a lot of these tools, and they’ve become a vital part of my photo blogging workflow. Recently the developer of one such utility which I hadn’t used before asked me if I’d be interested in reviewing it, and I’m glad he did, as it’s turned out to be a very useful little application. It’s called PhotoBulk, and it’s from Eltima Software

Following on from yesterdays post about my new site design, I wanted to update you on some more important updates and changes for the new year. The first concerns my Capture One guide. The second concerns my online store, and if you’ve purchased anything from me in the past, this is an important update, so please read it when you get the chance. 

I’ve been feeling lately that my site design had been getting a little stale. What’s more, it was dictating to me how I approached my posts, and it was getting to the point where I really wasn’t happy with it. It wasn’t just the design in terms of what you see but also the functionality. I was adding bits on and using some cheats to get around certain functions that the theme didn’t have, and it was starting to look dated. 

Last weekend here in Dublin, there was a special Christmas edition of the monthly Dublin flea market, and I went along with my camera (of course) to check it out. It wasn’t exactly a typical Christmas market, more of a special extra large version of the normal market for Christmas. 

Adobe have updated Lightroom to version CC2115.8 or 6.8 depending on which version you have. The latest update provides some bug fixes as well as new camera and lens profiles. It also adds a significant new feature called Reference View (Only available in the Creative Cloud version I’m afraid)

I’ve been travelling for the last few days, and I’m in Brussels, in Belgium. I’ve been here quite a few times and I know my way around quite well now. I usually photograph the sights and the buildings, but this time, as I was only here for a short trip, I spent my photo taking opportunity shooting street photography instead. 

Capture one has long been a rival to Lightroom, and I’ve been suggesting its use for Fuji X-Trans shooters for some time. However, Capture One Pro 9 seemed to be lacking in the quality of its conversions for X-Pro2 users and there were a number of issues holding it back. Today, Phase One launched a new version, Capture One Pro 10, and I’m happy to say that those issues are gone. 

At this time of the year, the days can get very dark and dreary here in Ireland. With the short winter days, when it’s sunny it’s actually quite beautiful, but when it clouds over, it becomes very dark and dreary. On days like this, it’s often tempting not to bother shooting, and certainly, I’ve been put off by what seems like bad light. However, as Jay Maisel once said, there’s no such thing as bad light, just difficult light. 

I wrote some first reaction thoughts on On1’s new RAW photo processor on Friday, specifically how it relates to Fuji X-Trans Files. Since then I’ve spent a bit more time trying it out, and I tried it using images from a few different cameras. When not using X-Trans files the results seem quite different, and so, while my first thoughts were a bit overly negative, I’m a bit more optimistic now. 

On1’s forthcoming “RAW” application has been teased for quite some time now. The Company has touted it as completely new modern raw engine, and a lot of people who have been frustrated with Lightroom have been hoping that this new raw software could be a possible replacement. The software is still in beta, but they have released a pre-release build to customers and I’ve been trying it out. I’ve been getting quite a few emails from people asking about this, so I took the plunge and bought the software t try it out (you’re welcome). I was particularly curious to see how it handles X-Trans images. 

The next version of Affinity Photo, due for release fairly soon, has a pretty impressive feature release. The company has released a “release candidate” beta for existing customers along with a long list of improvements. There is a lot on it, and they’ve really listened to customer feedback. I’m trying the beta now and I’ll report back if anything stands out, but for now, here’s some highlights from the release notes about some of the feature’s that I’m most excited about.

This is pretty old news at this point, but as I hadn’t covered it before, I thought I’d touch on it briefly. A while ago VSCO released an updated version of their Film series of Lightroom Presets to support the Fuji X-Pro 2 and XT-2. I finally got around to trying it out, and I’m liking the results.

With most cameras that are released these days having video, it may seem like a pointless exercise to point out the benefits of having the feature. However, if you read the comments on reviews of new cameras (and you probably shouldn’t for your own mental health) there’s always someone who complains about the video functions, saying that they are a photographer and “real photographers” don’t care about video. Even if you don’t like shooting video, I think that there are times when it’s a real benefit to have video in your camera, and the other day I came across a perfect example.