Just a quick note for those who might be interested. Capture One is offering a bundle of its new Nordic Styles and its Beyond Style pack for €99 (compared to €138 to buy separately). If this is something you’re interested in, you can find out more on the Capture One website.

I’ve had a few readers ask me about using Adobe’s “Super Resolution” with Capture One. I had thought that this would be a relatively straight forward process, but unfortunately it seems to be a bit more involved that I first assumed. I had speculated that you could just open a DNG file created with Super Resolution in Capture One, but for whatever reason this doesn’t seem to work properly (more on this below). So, while you can’t use the DNG files directly, you can still use a Tiff or PSD. The workflow is a little more convoluted than perhaps it needs to be, but in this post, I’ll outline my suggested way of working with Super Resolution and Capture One.

DXO labs today announced the release of a brand new Application called “Pure Raw”. So what is “Pure Raw”? It is a RAW pre-processing application that uses the DXO engine to convert your raw files into DNGs using DXO’s demosiacing and lens correction technology, and more importantly their highly regarded Deep Prime AI based noise reduction. This results in a file that can still be edited much like a RAW file, keeping the ability to change white balance, recover highlights and so on, while taking advantage of DXOs imaging technology.

This is kind of a nerdy tip, but it’s actually a really useful thing to understand. Here’s the premise - you’re using Lightroom as your main way of organising your photos, but you want to use some other application to edit your raw file for whatever reason, and bring the result back into Lightroom. If you use the edit with function in Lightroom, you will only send a Tiff or PSD file rather than a RAW file, so unless the application to which you want to send it has a plug in, there isn’t an easy workflow. Or is there?

Ever since the most recent update (at the time of writing) to Photoshop included the new “super resolution” feature in Camera Raw there has been a lot of discussion, and an equal amount of misinformation about this feature. In case you missed it, “Super Resolution” is Adobe’s new method of upscaling a file using artificial intelligence to give a superior result to previous methods. There have been some wild claims about this online, including some claims that it doubles the resolution of your camera, and that you no longer need to buy a high megapixel system, as this is just as good. In this article, we will take a look at “Super Resolution”, discuss its actual usage case, and talk about some tips on how to use it.

Ever since Capture One released the 14.1 update, I’ve been playing around with the new style brushes feature, and I’m really linking it. As part fo my experimentation, I’ve been creating a few style brushes of my own, and so, I’m making these experimental brushes available for you tor download and try.

Capture one has launched two new style packs for the photo editing software. The new style packs are “Nordic” themed, and consist of two different style packs, each with two styles and three contrast variations for each style.

I’ve been working of a pretty old computer for some time now. My main workstation was an ageing 2012 Mac Pro, which despite its age was working perfectly for why I needed. Or at least I thought it was. I decided to take the plunge and embrace the future with an M1 MacBook Pro. It’s been an eye-opening experience.

Here’s a quick round up of some of the recent happenings in the world of photography software. Capture One announced that Sony A1 Lossless compressed RAW support will be coming soon to Capture One, DXO software is having a sale on NIK plugins, and Photoshop and Lightroom received some recent updates.

Skylum has just released the second update to Luminar AI, and this one contains quite a few changes, including one big new feature. The headline change is the addition of Sky AI 2. This had been shown during the pre-release period of Luminar AI, but never made it to the first release. It’s now here with update 2 and it’s quite impressive, but that’s not all that is included in this update.

Capture One has released a spring update to its namesake photo editing application. Bringing the software to version 21.1 (or 14.1 to use the actual software version number), this new release adds two new features as well as the usual round of bug fixes and new camera and lens support.

If you ever have a problem with your Capture One catalogue then you may be forced to recover from a backup. This happened to me today, and I had to recover (my own fault) and so I thought that it might be worthwhile sharing this experience for those who may be wondering. The process is relatively easy, and in this post I’ll talk you through the procedure.

One of the tools recently added to Photoshop was a new AI-based sky replacement feature. Similar to the headline feature in Luminar, it allows you to replace a sky without complex masking. While sky replacement has gotten something of a bad name recently, it can actually be useful for quickly fixing an otherwise problematic image. In this case, I use it to replace an overexposed sky with a similar one and salvage a photo with a minimal amount of work.

Just a quick update on Capture One Express. When Capture One Pro was updated to version 21, I saw a few people saying that Capture One Express was discontinued. This is not the case. There was also speculation that it wasn’t updated to version 21 but this too isn’t true. I got in contact with Capture One to clarify the current state of the application, and so here are the details.

One of the topics I see coming up frequently on various forums and from my own readers is how to do skin softening in Capture One. In this video, I show you some techniques for achieving a natural-looking skin smoothing technique, and I also talk about some masking tricks and how to control the effect using layer options.