Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
All tagged Tutorial
This is one of those things that you might only ever come across once in the blue moon, but when you do, it’s useful to know how to fix it. If you’re shooting with a wide-angle lens, something like a 24mm or wider, and you have people at the edge of the frame, they can be distorted. This is especially true when shooting in portrait orientation and looking up. Like I said, this is a very specific situation, and it’s only by chance that I knew how to fix this.
I was recently in Edinburgh, Scotland for a week, and while I was there I had been planning to spend quite a bit of time out taking photos around the city. Unfortunately, the weather had other plans. It was pretty much raining and cold the whole time. And when I say cold, I do mean cold. But more than that, it was really dark. Like, twilight dark the entire time. So eventually, I forced myself to get out and shoot, regardless of the result, and said result wasn’t great. However, when I got back to my computer, with a little editing I was able to get a pretty decent image of the castle. As there was such a difference between the result I got and where I started from, It thought It would make a good tutorial video, and so here you go!
Nik Silver Efex is one of the longest running Lightroom and Photoshop plug-ins out there, and I think it was one of the first plug-ins I ever bought. This was years ago before the suite was owned by DXO and even before they were owned by Google before that. In recent versions, some aspects of the software have changed quite a bit. As I haven’t covered it in quite a while, I thought I would share a few random tips for using the latest version.
Recently, I had one of my backup hard drives fail on me, and it reminded me that my archiving and backup setup for my photography needs some work. While I do have a comprehensive solution for client work, my personal projects are in a somewhat precarious state. Ideally, you should have your important data backed up in at least three places, but I suspect many people don’t do that. However, it occurred to me that I actually have multiple cloud services that I probably don’t fully utilise, so after a little thinking I came up with a way to doubly and triple protect my work going forward. It involves using Apple Photos and Lightroom desktop.
On rare occasions, you might encounter the need to update an AI mask in Lightroom, but unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a direct way to do so. For instance, if you use DXO Pure Raw and apply an AI mask to an image, since Pure Raw employs its own distortion correction algorithm, the mask may become misaligned when the file is returned to Lightroom. This issue can occur with any software that manipulates the raw file while preserving edits.
Ever since Adobe added the new masking architecture in Lightroom a few years ago, it’s totally changed the way I work with the software. I find myself using masks way more than I used to and it’s led to me approaching my edits in a whole different way. To try and take that to the limit, I set out to see if I could edit a photo entirely by just using the masks tool, and not touching the standard editing controls.
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!
Earlier in the summer I spent some time in New York City and I took various photos while there, although I’ve been a little behind in editing them. As part of the trip, we spent some time in Brooklyn and I got some good shots, but I am only getting around to properly editing them now. I thought this might make a good video, so I recorded a session of editing 4 of these using Capture One.
Recently, I was trying to record a tutorial on editing landscape photography. In the end, I didn’t publish it because I felt that the edits I had done weren’t dramatic enough for people to watch. In fact, I even had that criticism about some of my editing tutorials before, that the edits I was making weren’t significant enough. This led me to realise the paradox of photo editing tutorials, especially on YouTube or other socially driven platforms. Unless you’re dramatically changing the image or doing extensive edits, people will find it “boring” and not watch or complain. But the reality is, in most cases, restraint will lead to better images.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I recently decided to close my Patreon channel after several years of running the page. had produced some exclusive videos for Patreon, that because of my failure to grow my channel there, never really got seen by an audience, so I’m going to share some of them here now.
In a recent blog post I covered the icons on the top of each of Capture One’s tool panels, and part of that was how you can sync settings from an individual adjustment panel. Based on the responses I got, it occurred to me that the way you sync settings in Capture One is a little confusing, especially for Lightroom switchers, and so I decided to make a video to explain it.
On my recent photo essay from Hook lighthouse in Ireland, I was editing the images, and wanted something a little special for the cover photo. I had tried lots of different things, and in the end, the image I used went through several steps to get it to where it was for the final use of it. In this video I talk you through the steps I took from the starting raw photo to the finished image.
With the latest release of Capture One that was announced last week, the company changed the way you export images from the software, adding a new interface. They also removed the old output tab which had the processing options in it. This has led to some confusion among long time users about how to do certain things now. The one I’ve seen requested the most is how do you do recipe proofing now? Well, it’s actually not that different.
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.
