Flowers are probably not the subject you normally associate with black and white images, but you can actually create some nice imagery with the right black and white technique. As I haven’t been able to get out to take photos as much as I used to over the past few months, with the current global situation, I’ve been making the most of any photos I do get. So, when I shot some flowers at a stately home and gardens recently, I’ve been making as much use of them as possible. I’ve already shared the main set of phots form the shoot, but I’ve also been using the images to experiment with different techniques. One of these was creating nice monochrome flower images.

This weekend we visited a stately home and gardens in Co. Wicklow (in Ireland) that has opened up to the public. Funnily enough, this was near to where I grew up, but I never even knew it was there. The Kilruddery estate, which has a “Tudor revival” style mansion based on a 17th-century foundation, and is also a working farm, and has beautiful grounds and gardens.

In this video, I show you how to use Silver Efex Pro (and other Nik Plug-ins) with Capture One non destructively. I actually covered this a while ago in a blog post, but I wanted to create a screencast as its a bit easier to explain.

My newest “quick edit” video is now up on YouTube. In this episode, I walk you through how I edited this photo of the New York City skyline, taken from the Empire State Building at dusk.

In this video, I show you how to use the colour editor to do basic colour keying and create a masked layer based on a selected colour range in Capture One.

Capture One has launched some new style packs inspired by film that they’re calling “Beyond Film”. There are two new collections, one colour and one black and white. The Colour pack, “Beyond Film” has four styles with three variations, while the black and white pack has five styles in three variations.

One of the things that I’ve come across when corresponding with readers, is that some people seem to have major problems with the performance in Capture One, while others, like myself, have never had any issues with the speed of the software. Specifically, I often see people complaining that when they move a slider they have to wait a second for the display to update. This is not the normal performance of Capture One, and so if you’re experiencing this, then something is definitely wrong.

Here’s a quick Capture One tip for you to start your week! With the latest version of Capture One, the company added a new before and after method, which can be accessed by pressing the Y key. This will give you a complete before and after on all adjustments, but what if you only want to see the effect of temporarily resetting one adjustment? In other words, what if you want to see a before and after view for a single panel? Well, this is pretty easy in Capture One.

When working in Capture One last week, I had been thinking to myself: “Self, you must come up with some new tutorials for the kind folks that read your blog” but I just couldn’t come up with anything profound and dramatic. Then I realised that perhaps I was looking in the wrong place, and it occurred to me that many of the little things that I do regularly may not be known by everyone. So, with that in mind here is a random collection of quick little tips that may help your workflow…

Skylum Software has just announced the launch of the latest version of its Luminar software. The latest update, version 4.3, adds the ability to search photos, a user experience improvement to Looks, 500px integration, a new crop interface, and several performance improvements. It also brings a new space shuttle object, along with several improvements, for the AI Augmented Sky tool.

At the weekend we decided to go on an expedition in the car to the seaside. While we don’t exactly live inland, travelling around has become something of a chore now. On a July weekend, you might be thinking the beach would be packed, but at the height of a typical Irish summer, that wasn’t going to be a problem, as the temperature barely got above 16 degrees Celsius for the day, and the sky looked like something out of a science fiction movie. It did make for some nice moody photographic opportunities.

If anyone has my Free Capture One Style Pack bundle, someone just let me know of a potential problem with one of the styles. When I was making them, I may have left some of my metadata stored in one of the individual styles. If you have these, please delete the file QTransCap1-02.costyle and don’t use it, as it may overwrite some of your metadata. I have taken the files offline and removed them from the store.

Please read on for more details…

I have written a lot of articles about Capture One over the past year or more, and I realise that those who may be new to the site might have missed a good few of these, so I’ve decided to compile some of my most popular articles, and those I feel are worth reading.

This video is a complete and mostly unedited recording of my whole editing process of editing a street photography shoot in Lightroom. I go through the whole process from culling shots in the Library module to editing the photos in the develop module. It’s also kind of like a video podcast, in that I talk (ramble) through my process.

When the restrictions were eased, and we could finally escape, we headed to the sea to get some fresh air and see the outside world. Here is a little collage of photos and poetry to enshrine the moment. Enjoy.