Do you still need to use X-Transformer? That’s the question that I’ve been getting asked pretty regularly since Adobe launched “Enhance Details” in Lightroom and Camera Raw. The answer might seem like it should be straight forward, but it’s actually a little complicated and it depends on a few factors.

Just a quick update on yesterday’s post: FilmLUX 3 is now available from my digital download store. FilmLUX 3 is a set of presets for Lightroom 8 or later and Photoshop CC 2019 or later. It was handcrafted by carefully studying the properties of various film stocks and creating my own version. It is designed to create a colour film look that is inspired by scanned film, although it isn’t intended to be a direct emulation of any particular film stock, but rather my own set of “virtual” films. 

I’ve noticed something interesting in my web stats lately. I’m getting an awful lot of traffic from articles related to the Sony A6000. Considering that I probably talk about Fuji cameras and processing far more, it surprised me that this is the number one thing that people come to my site for from search engines. But that’s not all, on my YouTube channel, videos about the A6000 are also getting a lot of traffic. In fact my first Street Photo Diary video about the A6000 is my highest watched video of all time.

It’s been a while since I released any Lightroom presets, but I’m happy to share some details of the next set that I’m working on. It’s another edition of my long running FilmLUX series, and I’m actually fairly proud of these. I wanted to create something that closely matched the feel of real film, without being over the top. I actually went through a lot of iterations before I came to this, and so, this is probably one of the sets that I’ve worked on the most.

I recently moved house, and doing my best attempt to Marie Kondo my office during the move, I ended up finding some things that I thought were long gone. One of which was a collection of PhotoCDs from 1996. The PhotoCD format is long since dead, so I wondered if I would have any chance at finding a way to use the files. After a little digging, I was able to get them to open! Here’s the full story…

It’s time for a brand new season of my “Street Photo Diary” series. Following on from the photo essay I posted earlier, I set out to shoot some street photos with a Sony A6000 on a beautiful spring day in Dublin City. I also talked about the settings that I use​ and the importance of capturing "mundane" subjects when shooting Street Photography.

Spring has arrived in the city with an unusually warm couple of days, and it really showed on the faces of the people as they went about their daily lives. The ever changing beat of the city seemed more alive, and everyone from the tourists to the locals seemed to be enjoying the nice weather.

I have just released a minor upgrade to my Fuji Lightroom Guide. The book entitled “Workflow and Settings For Processing Fuji X-Trans images in Lightroom” has been updated to take into account some of the more recent changes to Lightroom, including some of the different terminology and so on. It also adds mention of newer 26mp X-Trans cameras.

Skylum has released Luminar 3.02 which features a fairly long list of bug fixes and improvements. I haven’t had a chance to fully test this personally yet, but below is the list of what’s been fixed, added or changed. If you already have Luminar, you can upgrade by choosing “Check for Updates” in the Luminar 3 menu on the mac or the Help menu on a PC.

For the longest time I’ve been using an iPhone 6 plus. It has served me well. In fact one of the first photos I took with that phone was actually featured in Apple’s first “Shot on iPhone” campaign when it originally started, and I’ve been using it ever since. I never got around to upgrading for various reasons, but lately I felt that it was maybe time to stop trying to use the ageing device.

Just a quick note - Skylum is having a valentines day sale and is offering da discounted Luminar + Aurora HDR bundle. You can get Luminar 3 for US$49 instead of US$69, and Luminar 3 + Aurora HDR Bundle for US$119 instead of US$168. 

Ever since Fuji released its first X-Trans camera, and Adobe added support, many of us who have shot Fuji over the years have been unhappy with how Lightroom handles Fuji files. There are issues with the way it handles fine details, certain repeating textures and so called “worm artifacts”. People have been hoping that Adobe would eventually fix the problem, and turned to other solutions, such as Iridient X-Transformer. Others have switched away from Lightroom together to something like Capture One. Today, Adobe has released a new version of Lightroom which finally addresses the X-Trans issue. Well, sort of, as it’s probably not the solution that many were expecting.

Phase One is taking an interesting approach to creating their own Styles withe their latest Style packs. For a start it is interesting that a first party manufacturer has seen the advantages of creating their own add ons - something that Adobe never did with Lightroom. But their new “Editorial” Styles Pack was created in collaboration with renowned photographers and retouchers.

A few weeks ago I read a post on a fairly popular website from someone arguing that photography as an art from was being ruined because its become so accessible. The author was decrying the fact that anyone can take a photo now and anyone can call themselves a photographer. They believe that this has diluted the purity of the art (I’m paraphrasing) and are ruining it for the “real photographers”.

I was so excited when Capture One added Fuji film simulation support that I missed one of the handiest feature of the new version. One of the commenters on my YouTube channel pointed this following tip out, so big thanks to them for that! You can have Capture One detect which film simulation mode you shot with in-camera, and it will automatically apply the appropriate film simulation mode. Unfortunately, it doesn’t explicitly tell you which one you used, but it still works.