There is a pretty amazing exhibit on in Dublin Zoo at the moment. The “Wild Lights” experience, is an art show of sorts, featuring animal shaped lanterns which are all around the zoo, mimicking a real zoo experience, only in lights. The artwork was created by a group of china artists, and is really something to behold. My wife and I recently paid a visit to see the exhibit and it was amazing.

As promised, here is the Luminar questions and answers video that I talked about last week. I tried to answer as any of the questions that I’ve received regarding the upcoming release of Luminar 2018 as possible in this video, although I may have missed a few (and I didn’t want to make it too long)

I was out shooting some street photography the other day, and I was also doing some testing on a few different things. I wanted to try out some different settings for doing “VLOG” style videos, and I still have the RX100 that I borrowed, so I figured I would try that. Unfortunately, it was also really cold and breezy, and while the picture from the RX100 is great, the sound, not so much.

As part of my ongoing Fuji Jpeg book project (which is progressing - but still a little bit away) I recently set about working on some recipes for getting various looks. One of the main things I wanted to try, was to see if I could get something similar to “street pan” in look. This is a type of film that gives you high contrast black and white and is a popular “look” with photographers who shoot street photography on film.

There’s been a pretty big response to the coverage of the pre-release of Luminar 2018 from everyone, and I know people may still have questions about it. With that in mind, I’m going to do a Q&A video later this week, where I’ll answer as many questions as I can regarding the upcoming version, and if possible I’ll demonstrate the answers.

A little while ago I put up a poll on the site here, asking if people were planning on using Lightroom CC or not. It was in part, to answer my own curiosity as to whether or not people were going to use it, but also to gauge interest for supporting it in the future. Now that it’s been up for a while, I thought I would share the results.

In my first look review of Luminar 2018 I mentioned that you could possibly use LUTs for matching Fuji Film simulation modes in Luminar 2018. I dd some research and found some free LUTs online, and having tried them out, it certainly seems like this will work. 

Today, Skylum, the company formerly known as MacPhun, announced the next version of its flagship application Luminar. Luminar 2018, which is now available for pre-order, is a significant upgrade over the current version, and I have been lucky enough to get to use a beta version over the last little while. To me, this isn’t an incremental update, but a dramatic upgrade, and it almost feels like an entirely new application.

Lightroom Classic is essentially Lightroom 7 in Adobe’s weird new naming scheme. If you look in the about box, you will see the version number is listed as a 7.0 release. While a numbered upgrade like this is normally a major feature release, Lightroom Classic seems to offer relatively little in terms of new features since the previous version. The main areas are the new masking tools, improved importing and overall performance improvements.  

I recently had the opportunity to borrow a friend’s Sony RX100. The original RX100 was revolutionary when it first came out and I have always wanted to try one. Having used it, I can see now why it was such a game changer at the time. 

A while ago it was widely reported that google were discontinuing the Nik software collection.DXO has acquired the suite of tools from google. The new owner has stated that they will keep the suite free for now, but they also plan to continue development. 

With more and more new RAW conversion applications coming out from small and independent developers, many suffer from the same problem. Cameras aren’t profiled properly or poorly, and as a result when you open a RAW file in many of these applications the colours look a bit flat or different than you would expect. So I had an idea. Why doesn’t someone come up with a way to create an open format for profiling and an open source database.

I have been going back and forward on whether or not Lightroom CC is something I should bother investing any time in. On the one hand, I do think there are certainly uses for it, but given the lack of features, it’s kind of limiting. Having said that, I do have some ideas for how to get around some of them. However, before investing any time and energy in these, I wanted to know if anyone was actually planning on using it.

One of the things that you may not know is that Lightroom preset files are actually fairly easy to edit outside of Lightroom. The .lrtemplate files are just plain text files formatted as XML code. So, while not for the faint-hearted or technically challenged, if you know what you’re doing, you can actually open the files in a text editor and make changes. Obviously, you don't need to use BBEdit for this, any high-quality text editor will work.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock the last few days, you’ve undoubtedly read about the updates to Lightroom, specifically the split into two versions. I’m swamped with a client job at the moment (some design work) and so I haven’t had the time to devote as much to checking out the new versions as I would like. With that in mind, I will have a more detailed analysis on the Adobe announcements next week, once I’ve done thorough testing, but for now I wanted to give you my first thoughts.