Video: How to improve Capture One’s Preview Quality

I had blogged about this issue back in 2017, and as its still something that is present to some extent in the Capture One 12, I thought that I would revisit the fix I use for this. So rather than re-do the blog post I thought I would do it as a video. Basically, the issue with the way Capture One renders its previews is that it doesn’t render certain things properly, and in some cases the preview an be quite soft. I came up with a way to use recipe proofing to generate a more representative preview and in this video I show you how to do this…

Travelling light and taking a break

I was offline for much of last week as I was travelling for a few days across Europe with my wife for both business and a vacation. We started in Germany and then took the train to Brussels, before spending a few days off in Amsterdam for the weekend. I normally try to minimise the amount of gear I travel with when not specifically going for photography, and this time I decided to cut it right down. 

A few Software bits and Pieces

There’s been a few software related announcements recently that I haven’t had time to cover as I have been traveling recently. Some of these are also things I wouldn’t normally be interested in so I’m just going to cover them quickly, and rather than go through them all individually, I thought that I wold cover them here in a quick roundup post.

Film Lux 3 Now Available

Just a quick update on yesterday’s post: FilmLUX 3 is now available from my digital download store. FilmLUX 3 is a set of presets for Lightroom 8 or later and Photoshop CC 2019 or later. It was handcrafted by carefully studying the properties of various film stocks and creating my own version. It is designed to create a colour film look that is inspired by scanned film, although it isn’t intended to be a direct emulation of any particular film stock, but rather my own set of “virtual” films. 

Is the Sony A6000 is Achieving Cult Status?

I’ve noticed something interesting in my web stats lately. I’m getting an awful lot of traffic from articles related to the Sony A6000. Considering that I probably talk about Fuji cameras and processing far more, it surprised me that this is the number one thing that people come to my site for from search engines. But that’s not all, on my YouTube channel, videos about the A6000 are also getting a lot of traffic. In fact my first Street Photo Diary video about the A6000 is my highest watched video of all time.

Film Lux 3 Coming Soon

It’s been a while since I released any Lightroom presets, but I’m happy to share some details of the next set that I’m working on. It’s another edition of my long running FilmLUX series, and I’m actually fairly proud of these. I wanted to create something that closely matched the feel of real film, without being over the top. I actually went through a lot of iterations before I came to this, and so, this is probably one of the sets that I’ve worked on the most.

Using Kodak PhotoCD Files in 2019

I recently moved house, and doing my best attempt to Marie Kondo my office during the move, I ended up finding some things that I thought were long gone. One of which was a collection of PhotoCDs from 1996. The PhotoCD format is long since dead, so I wondered if I would have any chance at finding a way to use the files. After a little digging, I was able to get them to open! Here’s the full story…

Luminar 3.02 Released.

Skylum has released Luminar 3.02 which features a fairly long list of bug fixes and improvements. I haven’t had a chance to fully test this personally yet, but below is the list of what’s been fixed, added or changed. If you already have Luminar, you can upgrade by choosing “Check for Updates” in the Luminar 3 menu on the mac or the Help menu on a PC.

iPhone XR Camera + Lightroom Mobile

For the longest time I’ve been using an iPhone 6 plus. It has served me well. In fact one of the first photos I took with that phone was actually featured in Apple’s first “Shot on iPhone” campaign when it originally started, and I’ve been using it ever since. I never got around to upgrading for various reasons, but lately I felt that it was maybe time to stop trying to use the ageing device.

Adobe Finally Improves Fuji X-Trans RAW conversion in Lightroom with "Enhance Details".

Ever since Fuji released its first X-Trans camera, and Adobe added support, many of us who have shot Fuji over the years have been unhappy with how Lightroom handles Fuji files. There are issues with the way it handles fine details, certain repeating textures and so called “worm artifacts”. People have been hoping that Adobe would eventually fix the problem, and turned to other solutions, such as Iridient X-Transformer. Others have switched away from Lightroom together to something like Capture One. Today, Adobe has released a new version of Lightroom which finally addresses the X-Trans issue. Well, sort of, as it’s probably not the solution that many were expecting.

Photography is for Everyone

A few weeks ago I read a post on a fairly popular website from someone arguing that photography as an art from was being ruined because its become so accessible. The author was decrying the fact that anyone can take a photo now and anyone can call themselves a photographer. They believe that this has diluted the purity of the art (I’m paraphrasing) and are ruining it for the “real photographers”.

Capture One Quick Tip - Automatically Set the Film Simulation that you Shot With.

I was so excited when Capture One added Fuji film simulation support that I missed one of the handiest feature of the new version. One of the commenters on my YouTube channel pointed this following tip out, so big thanks to them for that! You can have Capture One detect which film simulation mode you shot with in-camera, and it will automatically apply the appropriate film simulation mode. Unfortunately, it doesn’t explicitly tell you which one you used, but it still works.