I just wanted to post a quick follow up on the news that I am closing my store. I have received a lot of well-wishing, and I want to thank everyone, but there has also been a little bit of confusion that I wanted to clear up.

This isn't a decision I have taken lightly, but I have decided to close my digital download store. I will cease selling content on Thursday, September 10th. The website will remain online until the end of September to allow anyone who may have made purchases to download and back them up. After that, the store will be taken offline.

There’s something going on with Adobe and Canon regarding Lightroom and Camera RAW that I am a bit confused about. So, basically, over the past little while, Adobe has stopped supporting camera matching profiles for Canon cameras. There have now been around 10 models that Adobe hasn’t released camera matching profiles for. I did some research on this, and apparently, a post (now deleted) on an Adobe forum over a year ago (from an Adobe rep), claimed that they were having issues with the CR3 format, but frankly, I don’t buy this, especially as over a year has passed.

Capture One has released an update to the software of the same name. The new version of Capture One 20, 13.1.2, is mainly a bug fix and new camera support release. Of significant note is support for the Canon Eos R5 and R6, as well as preliminary support for the Sony A7SIII. Also listed is new film simulations for Fuji Medium Format Cameras.

Adobe has just released a whole bunch of updates across its creative cloud lineup, including updates to Lightroom and Lightroom Classic and the corresponding release of Camera Raw. These are mostly bug fixes and new camera support, but they do add support for the recent releases from Canon, namely the Eos R5 and Eos R6.

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.