French software company DXO Labs celebrating its 20th anniversary this month, and to commemorate it they are offering 20% off all of their software for the next 20 days. The company’s first product: DXO Optics Pro, the precursor to DXO Photo Lab launched this month 20 years ago in June 2004. Since then the company has added to its portfolio of photography software, including DXO Pure Raw, the NIK Collection and DXO Film Pack.

A little while ago, we decided to take a few days break away from the hustle and bustle and headed off on an adventure. We wanted to go somewhere out of the way. Where we ended up was probably about as far away as you can get in Ireland without actually leaving the mainland or going on a ferry. For the longest time I had wanted to visit the top of the island, and so my wife booked us into a hotel on the northernmost peninsula not he northernmost county in Ireland: The windswept and very beautiful Inishowen peninsula in Co. Donegal. And what a place it is.

Adobe has announced a new release of Lightroom, and it has the usual bug fixes and new camera support in this release as well as some new features. There’s one new feature which, I think, is probably going to be what most people will talk about with this release; that’s the new generative remove, powered by the companies “Firefly” AI engine.

DXO has just announced the latest release of its popular NIK software collection. The new version features a range of updates across all of its applications, with some interesting new workflow options and a speed increase across the collection.

Back in April my wife and I took a road trip to the northern most region in Ireland, the Inishowen peninsula in Co. Donegal. We were there for a few days and took the opportunity to photograph the northern most point on the island of Ireland, as well as some of the incredible beaches in the area.

DXO has just released a new update for its PhotoLab Raw editing software. Photo Lab 7.6 Includes new features, new included LUTS and for a limited time is available at a reduced cost. This months Optics Module release includes 1400 new camera and lens combinations and adds support for new cameras such as the Sony A9III and the Hasselblad CFV.

In part one of this series, I talked about my visit to the Danish capital of Copenhagen last May. In this second part, we travelled on to the Swedish capital of Stockholm and were treated to an unusually warm early May weekend, which led to an amazing few days in the beautiful city.

I was recently visiting a somewhat famous waterfall not too far from where I live and of course I took some photos while I was there. We went primarily to enjoy the fresh air and scenery, so it wasn’t a specific photo shoot, but even so I got some interesting images. One worked out particularly well, and I thought my process for editing it would make an interesting video, so here it is!

A good while ago now, I posted some photos of a dramatic seascape that I had taken of Dublin bay in the aftermath of a storm. A few people had asked me how I created the dramatic black and white look, and so I thought it would make a good video. I had used a combination of Lightroom and Nik Silver Efex for the processing and in the video I walk you through the process.

Today, DXO announced the release of the latest version of Pure RAW, the company’s RAW pre-processing software. Version 4 adds some welcome new features including a new version of Deep Prime, DXO’s noise reduction and demosaicing technology, improved lens softness correction, and new workflow improvements. One of the most requested new features is that you now have the ability to control the amount of noise reduction through new advanced settings options.

I’ve been a Fujifilm shooter for quite some time now. The original X100 still sits on a shelf in my office, and I’ve had a total of 5 different Fujifilm cameras over the years. While the original X100 wasn’t my first Fuji camera, it was probably the one I used for the longest. Since then, there have been numerous iterations of this camera, each better than the previous one. I never really bothered upgrading the X100 because my other Fuji cameras pretty much did the same thing, but with the additional option of changing lenses. Now with its latest iteration, is it time to finally upgrade? And what does the X100VI release say about the rest of the Fuji Lineup?

When you import ProRAW files into Lightroom, it defaults to using the Apple ProRAW colour profile. The colours on this are…let’s just say, they’re not great. It makes it look like it would if you had just shot it normally and not used ProRAW. In particular, shadows seem pushed too much, and highlights have a weird yellow tone. No problem, just switch to one of the Adobe colour profiles, I hear you say. This is where the weirdness comes in. If you switch to the Adobe profile, it will be significantly under exposed.

I had this great plan to start the new year with a fresh blogging schedule, and a renewed energy. Of course that didn’t happen. It’s two weeks later and I’m only getting around to writing my “new year” post now. Like many a New Year’s resolutions, they crashed and burned on day two! But now that I have a moment, let me update you on a few things that have been happening, and some plans for the next little while.

Capture One has announced that the company is discontinuing the free tier of its software, Capture One express. The software will no longer be available to download after January 31st, 2024.

A little while ago I was going through some photos and I came across a cool shot I had taken in New York of a dog in front of a large window. Unfortunately it was ruined by the reflection of yours truly. Normally removing something like this would be quite time consuming, so I thought, why not try Generative Fill. Not only did it work, but it worked perfectly at removing the reflections and keeping the other detail. So I made a video to show you the process…

All this week, DXO is offering up to 50% off new sales and upgrades for DxO PhotoLab, DxO PureRAW, Nik Collection, DxO FilmPack, and DxO ViewPoint. DxO’s photo editing software applications will be available at the best prices of the year from Monday, November 20 to November 27 (Cyber Monday). Click through for more details

Two of the most impressive features added to Lightroom in recent years are the AI-based “Denoise” and “Super Resolution” features that live in the “Enhance” tool. Denoise has been something of a game-changer in particular. Unfortunately, though, you can’t use both of these functions on the same image. Or can you?

For the last few years, whenever I wrote about Capture One, I would invariably get a comment from someone about how poor the performance was in the software. Try as I might, I could not replicate the results, so the reason behind this perplexed me. To be honest, I had assumed it was some external factor causing the issue. Well, I owe my readers an apology on this because, after recently upgrading to a new computer, I too now have this problem, and it seems to be due to running the software on a 4k display.