Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
A little while ago I put up a poll on the site here, asking if people were planning on using Lightroom CC or not. It was in part, to answer my own curiosity as to whether or not people were going to use it, but also to gauge interest for supporting it in the future. Now that it’s been up for a while, I thought I would share the results.
In my first look review of Luminar 2018 I mentioned that you could possibly use LUTs for matching Fuji Film simulation modes in Luminar 2018. I dd some research and found some free LUTs online, and having tried them out, it certainly seems like this will work.
Today, Skylum, the company formerly known as MacPhun, announced the next version of its flagship application Luminar. Luminar 2018, which is now available for pre-order, is a significant upgrade over the current version, and I have been lucky enough to get to use a beta version over the last little while. To me, this isn’t an incremental update, but a dramatic upgrade, and it almost feels like an entirely new application.
Lightroom Classic is essentially Lightroom 7 in Adobe’s weird new naming scheme. If you look in the about box, you will see the version number is listed as a 7.0 release. While a numbered upgrade like this is normally a major feature release, Lightroom Classic seems to offer relatively little in terms of new features since the previous version. The main areas are the new masking tools, improved importing and overall performance improvements.
I recently had the opportunity to borrow a friend’s Sony RX100. The original RX100 was revolutionary when it first came out and I have always wanted to try one. Having used it, I can see now why it was such a game changer at the time.
A while ago it was widely reported that google were discontinuing the Nik software collection.DXO has acquired the suite of tools from google. The new owner has stated that they will keep the suite free for now, but they also plan to continue development.
With more and more new RAW conversion applications coming out from small and independent developers, many suffer from the same problem. Cameras aren’t profiled properly or poorly, and as a result when you open a RAW file in many of these applications the colours look a bit flat or different than you would expect. So I had an idea. Why doesn’t someone come up with a way to create an open format for profiling and an open source database.
I have been going back and forward on whether or not Lightroom CC is something I should bother investing any time in. On the one hand, I do think there are certainly uses for it, but given the lack of features, it’s kind of limiting. Having said that, I do have some ideas for how to get around some of them. However, before investing any time and energy in these, I wanted to know if anyone was actually planning on using it.
One of the things that you may not know is that Lightroom preset files are actually fairly easy to edit outside of Lightroom. The .lrtemplate files are just plain text files formatted as XML code. So, while not for the faint-hearted or technically challenged, if you know what you’re doing, you can actually open the files in a text editor and make changes. Obviously, you don't need to use BBEdit for this, any high-quality text editor will work.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock the last few days, you’ve undoubtedly read about the updates to Lightroom, specifically the split into two versions. I’m swamped with a client job at the moment (some design work) and so I haven’t had the time to devote as much to checking out the new versions as I would like. With that in mind, I will have a more detailed analysis on the Adobe announcements next week, once I’ve done thorough testing, but for now I wanted to give you my first thoughts.
Today Ireland is bracing for the impact of one of the worst storms ever to hit the country. As I sit here typing this, there’s a weird eery calm outside. While Ireland has its fair share of bad weather, we have a generally calm climate compared to other parts of the world, and extreme weather events are quite rare. The weather forecasters are saying that this storm, ex-hurricane Ophelia, will be the worst in 50 years. They are also saying that it is in many ways unprecedented and that the country hasn’t experienced anything like this before.
A while ago I wrote about a handy little utility that I use now and again for blogging called Photobulk. It’s a little application that allows you to quickly batch process images in order to resize and add watermarks. It’s useful if you’re blogging photographs that you’ve created in applications such as Apple Photos that doesn’t create watermarks. A new version has just been released which adds some new features and a new interface.
Iridient X-Transformer is finally out of beta and version 1.0 is now available to download from the company’s website. The updated version is mainly just bug fixes from beta 4 but it also includes support for the X-E3.
As anyone who has followed my blog for a while knows, I often use lots of different applications for processing my photos. This leads to the obvious conundrum of how to manage the final images. I like to keep a single library with exported Jpegs of everything, so that if anything happens I have a backup, but also so that I can easily use the files online, on social media, or easily find images for a project or client. I currently have two ways of doing this, one using Mylio, and the other using Apple Photos.
The next version of the On1 Raw application, called On1 Photo Raw 2018 has just been released as a beta, and I thought I’d give it a spin. Longtime readers of my blog will know I haven’t exactly said kind things about the previous version, but I have an open mind, and I would really like to see an improvement. The new version offers a host of new features and improvements, but I was most curious to see if it addressed some of my biggest issues with the last version. Here’s what I found.
I was having an impromptu photowalk the other day and I decided to record my progress with a GoPro mounted to the camera’s hot-shoe. This is the result! I started out with the intent of doing some street photography, but I ended up walking around a local park, because the Autumn colours were so nice, and the light was just right too.
Autumn is now in full flow and it really is my favourite time of the year for photography. The Autumn light in Ireland is beautiful. The slow change of the seasons starts to bring a warm and golden light to the country as the sun is lower and lower in the sky. Throughout the season this effect becomes more and more profound. Combined with the colours this can make for some great Photography.
I’ve been talking about working with Fuji Jpeg files a lot recently, and I wanted to show one way in which I regularly work with them, and that is to use Apple’s Photos application. So, in this video, I take a look at how I go about editing Fuji Jpeg files in Apple’s Photos Application on the mac.
