Hot on the heels of the recently released version of Capture One for Apple Silicon Macs, the company announced last week that an iPad version is in the works.

DXO labs has just released an updated of the venerable Nik Collection, which includes a number of new features. The biggest updates within the “Nik Collection 4” bundle are Silver Efex and Viveza, both of which are significant updates with new interfaces and under the hood changes, including much more control over u-points.

Late last week, Skylum put out a new update for Luminar that, among other things brought a new set of controls and even more notably, support for Apple silicon Macs.

Capture One today released the latest version of the software, and it now runs natively on Apple Silicon. The new version has also re-written the acceleration code to use Metal instead of Open CL. The result should be greater stability and less acceleration issues on all Macs, both intel and Apple Silicon. In order to give you an idea of what the software runs like on an M1 Mac, I recorded a little video.

DXO Photo Lab has been awarded TIPA’s 2021 professional photo editing software award. The award is primarily for the applications’ impressive “Deep Prime” noise reduction software. I’ve covered this before a few times and it’s really impressive technology.

It's easy to get caught up in various discussion online about all things photographic, both technical and artistic. Some of these discussions are useful, but many are frankly nonsense. Some of the photography tropes that have become accepted in some quarters are doing active harm to the art of photography. The biggest of these is the notion that quality doesn’t matter. I see this over and over again, and while I’ve discussed this before, and why it does actually matter, I wanted to talk about the non-abstract real-world effects of this. The quality of photography used in professional settings is declining, and it's leading to a drop in quality of magazines and books and other publications of all types (not just photography related.)

A little while ago, I decided to upgrade my Vlogging camera, and so I bought a Sony Z-V1. I had been using a Canon GX1 Mark II, but I wanted something with 4k recording, and the Sony seemed like a good option. I have been using it on and off for the past few weeks, and so here is some early first impressions of Sony’s little Vlogging camera.

In this video I show you how to deal with chromatic aberration in Capture One when the default method won’t work.

Just a quick heads up - DXO labs has just announced a sale on most of their software. They’re offering 30% off all of their applications, including DXO Photolab, Film Pack , Viewpoint and the recently announced Pure Raw.

A few weeks ago Capture One launched a new style pack for the software of the same name, called “Nordic Styles”. Available in two packs, each with two styles in two variations, the stated aim of the styles is to “channel nordic light and beauty” and to “achieve elegant colour grading inspired by Scandinavian editorials.” I had a chance to try out both style packs, and in this post, is my first impressions.

It’s been a while since I updated my recommendations for Lightroom processing of Fuji files. Since then, Lightroom has been changing quite a bit, and so, while I had planned it before but never got around to it, I’m now in the pre-production stages of re-writing my Fuji Lightroom guide. One of the big things I’m changing is how I recommend people process their Fuji files for the best results.

Capture one announced on their facebook page that native support for M1 Macs will be coming in May. I wrote a little while ago about my experience with the software running under rosetta on the new Macs, and while it ran fine, there was some lagginess when editing. So the update will be welcome to those running a Mac with Apple silicon

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.