Now that Capture One 22 has been out for a little while, and I’ve had time to play around with the upgrade, I’ve collected a few random observations, and tips when it comes to the panorama merging function.

Every year we like to get up early on New Year’s day and head to the beach to watch the first sunrise of the new year. It’s a little ritual to start the year, but unfortunately, it hasn’t always gone exactly according to plan. Last year, we couldn’t actually get to the beach, because of a strict covid lockdown, as it was outside the permissible distance. This year we did get there, but instead of a glorious sunrise, we were treated to stormy seas and winds. Not exactly what we were hoping for, but it led to some cool photos anyway.

What a weird year it’s been. This time last year we were all delighted to see the back of a crappy 2020 and optimistic that the following year would be better. In some ways it was, but in others, not so much. I had hoped to see a return to some kind of normality in 2021 but instead we started the year in another strict lockdown, and from then on it was a rollercoaster of ups and downs.

This will probably be my last day blogging before Christmas, so I wanted to finish off by giving something back. As I had been working on various projects throughout the year, I have been creating and experimenting with various Lightroom presets, and I ended up with quite a collection. I had originally offered these to Patreon members, but as I’ve shut down my Patreon channel for now, I didn’t want them to go to waste, and so you can download them here.

One of my most popular Capture One posts on this website is the post entitled “Capture One vs Lightroom from someone who uses both”. I last updated this earlier this year, but since then, a lot has changed. With the release of Lightroom 11 which brings the new masking architecture, and Capture One 22 which adds Panorama stitching and HDR merging. This changes the dynamics of my previous arguments for each, and so I wanted to offer an addendum.

I think it’s safe to say that Capture One 22 is one of the companies most hyped releases of recent times. They have publicly touted the main features in advance and two of those features – “Panorama Stitching” and “HDR Merging” have probably been the two most requested features for Capture One for a long time. They are the two big features that Capture One lacks compared to Lightroom. So now that the software is released, are these features any good, and what else is new in Capture One 22?

DxO labs has just released the latest update to the Nik software collection. The latest release, version 4.3 features new presets to “enhances the character of landscape and travel photographs” according to the press release.

I recently wrote a blog post about the new “Recommended Presets” feature of Lightroom (Cloud version) and I mentioned that it was driven by the community. The community feature of Lightroom is probably one of the most underrated features of the software. If you are an experienced photographer, you probably haven’t even looked at it, as you may think — that's just for beginners. However, I think its worth a look for anyone, and in this post I’ll explain why.

Capture One has just announced that the next version of its photo processing software of the same name, will be released next week on December the 9th.

In Capture One, Variants are the equivalent of what Lightroom refers to as “virtual copies”. However, if you’ve come from Lightroom, you may notice that there are some key differences. In this post, we’ll look at some of the basics of using variants in Capture One.

It’s been quite a while since we got an update to Iridient X-Transformer, and I was beginning to get a bit worried about the future of the software. Some users had also written to me expressing their concern. Luckily my fears were unnecessary, and there is now a new version (Version 2.01) which brings support for all of the recent Fujifilm cameras as well as native Apple silicon compatibility.

One of the things that I love about Capture One is the fact that there are often many ways to complete the same task. Sometimes multiple tools can achieve similar results, but they go about it in slightly different ways. If you’re coming from Lightroom, at first, my may stick with the typical Lightroom tools. However, there are two adjustments that are frequently overlooked by Lightroom switchers because they’re not in Lightroom. These tools can be really useful occasionally, and they are the Levels tool and the Brightness slider.

DXO labs recently added Fujifilm support to PhotoLab 5, the companies Raw processing application. The support is currently in beta, but my initial testing shows that it gives promising results, that are among the best you can achieve. DXO’s Raw Pre-Processing application, Pure Raw, currently does not support Fuji files. However, if you want to use DXO’s technology with Lightroom, you can still use PhotoLab as a way to pre-bake your Fujifilm Raw files for use with Adobe applications.

I’ve recently been going over some old photographs and trying out some new treatments on them. A few years ago, while on a trip to Germany, we were staying on the outskirts of Darmstadt, and right near where our hotel was located, was a fairly large forest. I had taken lots of photos there at the time but I was never really happy with them.

Last week I posted on the blog about a new feature in the cloud version of Lightroom that gives you suggestions of presets to use. I’ve now done a video version where I go into it in more depth and show you exactly how to use the new Suggested Presets feature.