Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
All in News
I have had to temporarily disable sales on my online store as a technical problem has occurred that is affecting payment processing. I am working with the server administrators in my hosting company to resolve the issue, but in order to prevent any problems with customer purchases I am disabling sales until I can find a solution. I am also putting backup plan into place should this take too long to resolve.
Yesterday Phase One released the newest version of Capture One, Capture One 11. This new update features several major new features as well as some changes under the hood. The biggest difference in the upgrade is the new layers system, but there are also a lot of little features too.
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.
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.
You may have read this already, but if you’re a mac user considering upgrading to High Sierra, and you use a Wacom Tablet, then don’t. The company has announced that the system will require a new driver and that won’t be ready until the end of October.
Pixelmator, which was one of the first new generation Photoshop competitors to come to the mac a few years ago (before Affinity Photo) have just announced a new version called “Pixelmator Pro” which is coming sometime this Autumn (Fall). The new version is a completely new application and it looks really interesting, for a number of reasons
When Nikon pre-announced the D850 a little while ago, I was filled with a mix of excitement and a sense of trying not to get my hopes up. I have long been an owner of the Nikon D700, which was Nikon’s first model in this style of full frame smaller body cameras. I love the D700 and I still use it all the time, but it’s starting to show its age. I really want a high resolution camera for landscape and nature work, but I also want one that does video. I had hoped when the rumours started of the D850, that Nikon would come out with something similar to the Sony A7RII. I was not disappointed.
Luminar, which I’ve reported on and talked about a good bit on this site, is now available as a beta for Windows. The public beta is open to everyone and all you have to do is sign up to try it out.
It’s been over a week since I stared offering a membership option on Patreon, and I want to thank those who’ve already joined up. I also realised that I didn’t explain it very well the last time I posted about it, so allow me to elaborate a bit.
Macphun have just released a new and updated version of Luminar. The update features some big new features, as well as a lot of little improvements. I’ve had a chance to use the beta version for a few days, and there are some interesting new features in the application.
Based on popular request, I’ve created a bundle of all four of my current Fuji X-Trans post processing guides. The guides cover Capture One, Lightroom, Iridient Developer and Iridient X-Transformer. This bundle contains all 4 of these guides and is a little cheaper than buying them separately
I’ve been a bit out of the loop the last few days, as I’ve been dealing with a nasty bronchitis bug that has decided to pick the worst possible time to take me out of action. I was supposed to be travelling, but Instead I’m feeling sorry for myself and enjoying a tasty diet of antibiotics and lemsip. I was trying to keep my blog updated, and store ticking over, so if I’m slow in responding to comments please forgive me! I have managed to do a few things though, and so, here are a few updates:
Despite being widely rumoured, Sony still managed to make quite a splash when they announced the new A9 earlier this week. The new high end camera looks like it could be a genuine game changer for mirrorless cameras, and could cement Sony’s place at the number 2 spot, if not push it to number 1. I have been using Sony cameras on and off for the past few years, and I was eagerly waiting to see what this new high end alpha might entail. The camera is exciting in and of itself, but whats more exciting is Sony’s approach to the camera market. Let me explain.
I have lots of Lightroom Presets available now on this store and I wanted to be able to give you a way to try some of them out, so I’ve put together a collection of presets taken from the various sets, to make a free sample pack.
My guide for processing X-trans files in Capture One was actually the first of these series of guides that I produced. Since I’ve written it, the software has been updated several times, and Fuji has come out with newer cameras. I had previously added a supplement to the ebook to cover the X-Pro 2 because at the time support was still preliminary (it still is in a way). I’ve now updated the Capture One guide to include the previous supplement and I’ve also incorporated some tips for working with Capture One 10.
For quite a while I’ve been using Photoshelter to host my online image library. Initially it served as a place that I could deliver image files to clients, sell stock and also manage print sales. I really liked the service and it had a lot to offer, but I’m afraid that I’ve had to move to a different host. I didn’t want to, but the reason was quite simple. After two years or saying that they would do something about it, Photoshelter still didn’t properly support EU Vat law.
The has been several photography related announcements at CES this year, but I think the one I am most excited about is the news that Kodak is going bring back Ektachrome. Ektachrome is a slide (positive) film made by Kodak since the 60s and is generally considered to be one of the best slide films that you could buy at the time. It was discontinued by Kodak in 2012. If you’ve seen any issue of National Geographic during that time frame you’ve probably seen Ektachrome, as it was the film of choice for many National Geographic photographers.
After much rumour and speculation (or deliberate leaks) Canon has finally officially announced the 5D Mark IV. The new camera is the latest version of the venerable 5D line which revolutionised the DSLR market when it was first released, being the first mainstream DSLR with a full frame sensor. The new 4th generation version has an improved 30mp sensor, shoots 4k and has built in WiFi and GPS.
