Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
I’ve covered working with Fuji RAW files in Luminar before here on the blog, but I haven’t talked too much about using it with RAW files from other cameras. I had been going through some old images for another project, and I came across some images that I had taken with the Sony A7II which I had borrowed from a friend at the time. So, I tried some of the images in Luminar, and I was pleasantly surprised.
I’ve been working on my next Fuji guide for so long now, I can’t really remember when it started. I had wanted to write a guide on the specifics of working with Fuji jpegs, and I had a plan all laid out, but it ended up being more difficult that I had anticipated. I kept deciding to add parts, and then I would rewrite sections, and eventually the plan kind of went out the window. However, it’s finally nearly ready, and so I hope to be able to launch it next week. So what’s it about then?
I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Instagram. I go through periods of wanting to put the effort into it and then wondering if its worth the effort. On the one hand, it’s the platform of choice at the moment for photographers, whether you like that or not. On the other hand, ever since Facebook took over and started integrating its algorithm, I now only see a fraction of the posts from the people I follow, which is infuriating. However, I’ve decided to give it one more push before I give up. With that in mind, I was researching various techniques and tips for growing the platform, and I’ve come across some interesting ideas.
They say the best way to learn is by making mistakes. Well, if that’s true, then I learned a lot making this video. I was in two minds whether to even share it or not, but in the end I was convinced to put it up, regardless. The video itself isn’t too bad, but I made some mistakes when shooting that I’m kind of embarrassed about. So here’s what happened…
A couple of sites have been reporting over the last few days about the upcoming 7.2 release of Lightroom. Adobe have decided to focus on performance for this next release, and as a testament as to how important they feel this is, they’ve sent beta copies to various photography websites and news organisations ahead of time to show how serious they are about it.
Skylum software has just announced the first Luminar 2018 update for..well, 2018! The update focuses mainly on bug fixes and adds support for more languages on the Windows version. There are no new features apart from some additional camera support, so sorry, no sign of the DAM side of thing yet :-(
One of the highly anticipated new features in the latest Firmware update for the X-Pro 2 was the addition of highlight clipping warning in Live view. While you could get the “blinkies” previously in playback, there was no option to see them in live view until now. After you install firmware 4.0, you still need to enable it in the menu in order to turn it on.
I recently wrote about and made a video demonstrating Lightroom’s new AI-based automatic settings. If you haven’t seen it already, Lightroom now uses artificial intelligence when applying its automatic settings, and it’s much improved over the previous incarnation. However, after I had talked about that a reader sent me an interesting question: “How do you sync this auto option across multiple images?”. At first, I thought you would just use the synchronisation button at the bottom of the develop module, but it turns out, it’s not that straightforward. There are a few ways to do it, but they require a little work to find.
When Lightroom first came out, one of the biggest complaints that people had, was that the colours would change when importing RAW files. This led to the inclusion of colour profiles, designed to mimic a camera’s various picture modes, and this seems to address the problem. However, as time has gone by and Lightroom has supported more and more cameras, the quality and accuracy of the included colour profiles have started to vary significantly. If you find that, even with selecting a colour profile that matches what you shot in camera, the colours are still quite a bit off, then this trick may help you resolve the problem.
It’s been something of an odd January here in Ireland. For a start, it’s been pretty bloody dark. It has’t exactly been the ideal environment to go out an take photos. Being sick didn’t help either. I had just been thinking to myself I hadn’t really shot any street photography recently, and then, as if by magic, the opportunity presented itself, so off I went.
While it has been out for a little while now, I haven’t had a chance to try Fuji’s new X-Raw Studio application until quite recently. Part of this was because when it was initially released it didn’t support the X-Pro 2 (or rather the X-Pro 2 didn’t support it) and it was also partly because I have been pretty busy (and sick) and I just didn’t get around to it. Now that I have finally had a chance to test it out, here are my first impressions…
One of the bad habits that I’ve found myself doing a lot over the past few years, is being a bit lazy when it comes to post production. Even though I use a lot of different applications, I still find that I have gotten into this mental head space of always trying to do everything in the one application. This wasn’t always the case though. I used to work across multiple applications, usually starting in Lightroom, and then using Photoshop and maybe some plug-ins.
I’m happy to introduce my first new digital product of 2018, and something that I’ve been working on for quite some time. Today I’m launching a new set of LUTs based on my “Film Candy” series of Lightroom presets. This set of 75 LUTs contains looks from both Film candy 1 and 2 and have been designed to be used in popular video applications as well as stills software such as Luminar 2018 and Photoshop.
If there’s one complaint I hear again and again about Sony cameras, is that the colours are not pleasant. This is the most common complaint that people have when trying the camera. I have certainly grappled with this myself in the past when first using Sony cameras. The thing is though, it’s not strictly true. There isn’t really anything inherently wrong with Sony’s cameras though. The problem often comes from either a poor white balance or the calibration. If you’re shooting RAW and using Lightroom, there’s another issue: Adobe’s calibration for Sony files in Lightroom is awful.
As mentioned in several previous posts, I’ve been planning to do some more vlogging and videos, and I’ve wanted to get a small and unobtrusive camera for that purpose. I’ve been trying out several options, and so I used a christmas gift voucher haul to splash out on a new one. I settled on the Canon G7X Mark II. It’s a small, 1inch sensor compact camera, that does good video, and it has a flip over screen for self monitoring.
I was recently contacted by a representative from K&F concept who wanted to know if I would be interested in reviewing one of their camera bags. I actually have some of their other products, in particular some of their adaptor rings, and I’m really impressed with the quality for the price. So I said sure, why not! so they sent me one of their DSLR backpacks to try.
I’ve been running my Patreon membership for a couple of months now, and so far there’s been a fairly good response. It was kind of hard to explain what it was going to be when I fist started it, and even for myself, it was hard to exactly figure out what it was going to be. Now that it’s been up for a few months, I thought I’d share some of the details of what I’ve been doing on the channel, or page, or whatever you call it!
I wanted to match the look of an old photo that I already had, with a new image that I had just shot, but it was only a Jpeg. Starting in Apple Photos, and using Luminar as an extension I walk you through the editing process to make this otherwise dull image more dramatic.
