Some people prefer posting their photos to instagram using a frame, with white borders surrounding the image, n order to preserve the original aspect ratio. People are quite divided as to whether or not this is a good thing to do or not, but if you want to do it, there are lots of ways to go about it. If you use Lightroom, there’s actually a pretty easy way to get the white border effect inside of Lightroom, without having to use plug-ins or go to Photoshop.

Lightroom Classic used to have a terrible reputation for performance. Certainly, older versions of the software had some serious speed issues, but over the past few years, Adobe has worked to improve the responsiveness of the application. It’s now it’s a far cry from the way it used to be. However, If you have a modern computer, and you’re still experiencing a slowdown with Lightroom, there are a handful of common issues that could be causing it.

The Enhance function in Lightroom has been around for a while now. It was originally called “Enhance Details” but changed its name to just “Enhance” when the super resolution feature was added. For Fuji shooters, Enhance offers a way to get improved demosiacing inside of Lightroom without having to use third-party software. Using it on Fuji RAF files can provide significantly better rendering of detail in Fuji files, but it does come with some downsides.

Most people think of Styles when thinking about saving process recipes in Capture One. Styles let you save a wide range of settings into a file that can easily be recalled, and work great as both a time saver and for creating looks that you can apply to a photo. However, you shouldn’t forget about Capture One’s other recipe saving tool: presets.

I’ve been using Capture One for quite some time now (since version 6 I think) and in that time it’s come a long way. With recent versions, they’ve been adding a lot of features that people have requested for a long time, but there are still areas where I think the software could be improved. Moreover, some recent decisions by the company are somewhat perplexing, and there are areas there that could be improved too. So, in no particular order, here are the five things I would love to see improved in Capture One

When I closed my old digital download store a few years ago, I stopped selling most of my Lightroom presets. I figured that the market for these was pretty much saturated and that there wasn’t really any point. However, recently I’ve been receiving some requests for some of my older packs, and after using m T-Pan set on the most recent episode of Street Photo Diary, I’ve decided to make T-Pan available again.

My most popular series of videos on YouTube by far was “street photo diary”. It’s a series that I loved creating, but it has been on hiatus since 2019 and the pandemic hit. Well, I’m delighted to say that I’ve finally created a new episode, and it’s up on YouTube now. In this video I take my new Fujifilm XE-4 on a photo walk around Dublin City to see how well the camera works for Street Photography, and to see how it will fare as a replacement for my ageing Sony A6000

In colour grading for film and television, there is an age-old technique that is often used to make your footage look more cinematic or film like. The trick is to desaturate the shadow parts of an image. In fact, old versions of Final Cut (before FCPX) even had a specific plug-in for doing this called “desaturate lows”. In most modern colour grading and video editing tools, you have tools which let you control the saturation directly in relation to the brightness values in a scene, but in Lightroom, and other photo editing tools, this is one of the few tools you don’t have. Or do you?

This time last year, I posted a story on this blog called “Virtual Spring”. We were in the midst of lockdown and I couldn’t get out to get any photos of the changing seasons. While autumn has always been my favourite season to photography, spring is a close second. I love as the bleakness of winter gives way to new life, and it clears out the cupboards of one’s mind, as it were.

DXO quietly released the latest update to DXO Photo Lab sometime recently. I don’t know when exactly this was as there was no press release or anything and I wasn’t really paying that much attention to the software update notices, but it’s actually an important release for two reasons. It brings improvements to Fuji support and improves the way Fuji cameras are handled in an important way. It also makes us aware of a bug in the latest MacOS and offers a work around. Read on for more details

If you’re a Fuji shooter, you shoot RAW and use Lightroom Classic, then you probably regularly use the Fuji Film simulation colour profiles when processing your images. However, what if you want to customise those profiles? What if you’re not 100% happy with the colour balance for example, or you’d like to match some customisation options that you’ve set in-camera. Well, it’s actually easy enough to create your own custom versions of these colour profiles and in this video I’ll show you how!

Just a quick PSA - if you’re in the market for a new Adobe subscription, they’re currently offering 20% off the All Apps plan (this is the one I use) in select European, Middle East and Asian countries. Read on for more details.

Capture One has just released a new version of the software with some new features, bug fixes and improvements. This release brings Capture One to 15.2. The big new feature is an AI-based auto-perspective-correction tool, similar to Lightroom’s “Upright” feature. Also included, is an improved auto-straighten tool.

One of the things about Capture One that is both a good and a bad thing about the software, is that there are often many ways to do the same task. While some people like myself, like this about the application, new users often find this frustrating. One good example of this is rotating images. There are so many different ways to rotate images in Capture One and in this video I go through 9 different methods. (Well, I show 8, but I mention a 9th)

We recently decided to head out to the mountains to photography a nice spring day in national park in Glendalough, Co. Wicklow, but when we got there a cloud had descended. Long with the still bare moss covered trees, our jaunt in the sun became a trip into a fantasy story in a mysterious forested land…