Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
If you ever need to open a RAW file in Photoshop using Camera RAW I recently saw a demo featuring a feature that is sort of hidden, but is really useful. This is possibly a little bit technical, but the tip basically allows you to open a RAW file as a smart object without explicitly choosing the option to open as a smart object.
If you’re into photography at all, unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock (or stayed off the internet) you can’t help but have read about the recent “price hike” on Adobe’s Photography plan. Site after site reported that Adobe had “doubled” the price of its photography plan, which lead to cries and consternation from all corners of the internet. I was really in two minds as to whether to write about this or not, because I know this will be unpopular, and I will get lots of hate mail because of this. I was really angry and annoyed about this news. Not because of what Adobe did, but because of the way it was reported and the crazy carry on afterwards.
With the recent launch of Luminar Flex and the update of Luminar to 3.1, I’ve been seeing a lot of comments and I've been getting feedback from readers who are confused about the different versions. I have to admit, I was a bit confused myself at first, but I’ve since managed to get a better handle as to the main differences between the two. With that In mind, I will attempt to clear up some of the (yours and mine!) confusion.
Despite being discontinued several years ago, Apple’s Aperture software still worked for the most part with current setups, but that is about to change. Apple has issued a warning that Aperture won’t work with the next version of MacOS after Mojave.
Today, Skylum Software releases the first major update to Luminar 3. The release brings a couple of new features along with lots of other fixes and tweaks. The two headline features of the new version are Accent AI 2.0 and Raw + Jpeg management. I’ve been trying the beta for a few days and here’s what I found.
In this video I look at how to fix a burnt out sky, that you can’t recover with the highlights recovery or by adjusting exposure, in Capture One. Sometimes if your image is slightly overexposed, or if you’re photographing a high contrast scene you may come across a situation where the highlights are clipped and you can’t recover them. There is still a fairly easy way to fix the problem though, and in this video I show you how.
I’ve been managing to keep an ageing 2012 Mac Pro as my main computer for nearly 7 years now, and from time to time its really been a struggle. Over the years I’ve added various upgrades and replacement parts, and its somehow managed to keep going, despite getting a tremendous amount of use. Lately though it’s been driving me mad. It takes nearly an hour to reboot - from off to being useable. The OS comes up in about two minutes, but by the time everything loads and settles down and is useable - it’s nearly an hour. This is partly because of a slow system drive, and partly due to years of bits and pieces clogging the OS
This is just a super quick public service announcement and I almost missed this, but Phase One decided to extend the 50% sale of Capture One for the Fuji and Sony specific version until the end of April. It was supposed to end in March but they said it was so successful tat they were extending it to the end of April.
Last week Canon released a new version of its entry level DSLR (Previously the Eos 200D in Europe) and for the most part it flew under the radar, with the exception of the obligatory round of Canon bashing from the usual suspects. The thing is though, it’s actually a pretty capable little camera for the price, and if you’re starting out, especially if you want to get into Vlogging, it’s worth considering.
In the post I wrote yesterday about Capture One, I listed some of the things that it doesn’t have that are features of Lightroom. One of the things that I didn’t mention was Dehaze, and a reader Kindly pointed this out. The thing is though, you can achieve a similar effect to Lightroom’s Dehaze in Capture One, but it’s just a little bit more work to set up. In order to show you how to do this, I created a little video..
I’ve been covering Capture One for a while here on the blog, and it seems that there is more and more interest of late. However, often when I do cover it, I get comments or mail from people who complain that it doesn’t have this feature or that feature, and some are upset with me for not pointing this out. So I thought I would try and do as comprehensive as possible, a comparison between Lightroom ad Capture one, listing the pros and cons of each, as well as why I like it so much.
While it’s not directly supported, its relatively easy to get Luminar Flex to work in Capture One. There are two main ways to do it and in this video I show you both methods and the pros and cons of each.
Skylum has just announced Luminar Flex. This is basically a plug-in only version of Luminar. It seems as if they are planning to fork Luminar into two different products. Luminar Flex, which will be the plug-in version and then Luminar 3 which is the complete standalone software.
A little while ago Skylum launched a new piece of software for drone photography called “AirMagic”. Initially, it wasn’t something that I was too interested in, as I don’t have a drone, but then it occurred to me that I do have quite a few images taken from either high buildings or out of a plane window. They had sent me a review copy, so I decided to give it a try and see what it could do.
Mastin Labs, which is a popular creator of Lightroom Presets has announced a new style pack for Capture One bringing their Kodak film emulation presets to Phase One’s software.
I’m happy to announce that my latest set of styles for Capture One is now available. T-Neg for Capture One is designed to create a film like grade to your image. The pack consists of 10 virtual “films” of my own creation, and each film has 5 variations.
In the latest episode of Street Photo diary, I take the original X100 out for a spin to shoot some street photography around Dublin City
I hadn’t had a chance to shoot some street photography in nearly a month, so I was happy to get out and shoot again. I wanted to try and practice and change up the way I shoot a bit, especially for street photography. I wanted to focus on things like shadows, and reflections, and be on the look out for something different to the type of things I normally shoot. I wasn’t hugely successful in changing my habits, but I still got a couple of shots I’m really happy with.
