Today, Nikon announced their new retro styled camera, the Nikon Zfc, which wasn’t much of a surprise as it had been rumoured for weeks now, and pictures of it had been leaked for the last little while. I don’t know what it is about camera companies these days, but they can’t seem to keep any product much of a secret before its launch. Even so, it’s nice to see the official details, and for the reactions from the lucky people (who are important enough) to get their hands on it. I have to say, I really like what Nikon has done here, and I would absolutely consider putting this on my shopping list.

If you’re a Capture One user there are lots of little things that you may or may not be aware of that can actually help your workflow, but are too small to put in an article all by themselves! So, I’ve collected a few of these quick tips into a single post. Depending on your experience level, you may have come across some or all of these before, but for beginners or Lightroom switchers, I hope you find some of these useful.

This is one of those tips, that I actually exclaimed out loud when I realised it, but I’ve struggled ever since to figure out how to write about it. The reason is that it’s kind of a very specific nerdy thing, and while I was very excited when I discovered it, trying to figure out a way to explain why you should be excited too, has eluded me. The thing is, for years I’ve had a very specific problem in Lightroom, and there’s been no way around it, until recently. So what is this problem? Read on for more.

Just a quick follow up on the recently released Nik Collection 4, which I posted about recently. Since its release I’ve been trying out the various applications, with the intent of writing a review, specifically of Silver Efex Pro, which is the main application I use in the suite. Since the release, and my initial post, I’ve noticed a couple of things.

One of the things some people often like about Capture One when they first try it is that they find it gives them sharper images or more detail than other software. However, I also often see complaints that details can look pixelated and over-processed. Depending on your camera and the type of images you take, you may notice this too, especially with older images. In my opinion, Capture One’s defaults are set too high. Whenever I get a new camera, it often takes me a little time to get the settings just right, but in the following post, I’ll share the parameters I often use when in a hurry, or where I start with when dealing in a new camera.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a photograph that I’ve been really pleased with, what with the Pandemic and lockdown limiting photo taking opportunities. I had actually created this photo and posted it to Instagram, when some people asked me if I could do a tutorial explaining how I had edited the photo. So, I went back and recreated the edit and in this video I walk you through my process from start to finish.

Recently both Capture One and Lightroom have been released as Apple Silicon native versions. I have covered both of these in videos on my YouTube channel recently. For Capture One I showed you how the interface responds with the new version, and for Lightroom, I did a test comparing import and export speeds for the M1 native version compared to the older version running under rosetta. Since I had the benchmarks for this, I figured why not run the same test for Capture One.

Today, as part of the June photography updates, Adobe launches the latest version of Lightroom Classic. Version 10.3 brings native support for Apple silicon, as well as adding the “Super Resolution” feature from the most recent release of Photoshop.

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.