Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
So I had a scary experience earlier today. I went into Dublin City to get some photos to finish off a video I was working on for my YouTube channel. I had taken out my camera to shoot some photos, and just as I was walking down the street, some guy on a bike came up behind me and started giving out to me for taking photos of someone, and then proceeded to grab my camera and push it into my face.
Yesterday, Skylum announced the next new feature of Luminar 4 in their somewhat odd slow roll out of software features. The tool, called AI structure, uses artificial intelligence to add structure to an image in an intelligent way.
The special offer Phase One has been running all summer on the Fuji and Sony versions of Capture One, is due to expire in a few days on August 31st. There’s still time to get the Fuji and Sony versions of Capture One Pro for 50% off until then.
I’ve finally gotten around to something I should have done a log time ago. I have finally upgraded the graphics card in my Mac Pro. I had been owing the original and extremely bad (by today’s standards) ATI 5770 and its paltry 1gb or ram. Amazingly enough I managed to get by all these years, but it was becoming increasingly problematic, so I finally ordered a replacement.
I’ve had the Spyder X attached to my computer for over a week now, and for the most part there isn’t much one needs to do. It does continue to work away in the background though, so I wanted to give it some time to see what it was like to be using it over a longer period.
Back in June I spent a week in New York, and while I was there I didn’t do much photography, as I was mainly there for a holiday, and also I was recovering from a bad chest infection that I had had the previous month. Even so, I couldn’t resist the call of the camera, so I still managed to get some shots in.
Back in May of this year, I had gone out to shoot an episode of the Street Photo Diary video series. I shot the stills, and I even had the go-pro attached to record the camera’s point of view, but something came up so I never got to record the accompanying pieces to camera and so never finished the video. As a result, I never did anything with the photos from that day, and they kind of got lost among other projects and I forgot about them, until today when I found them again.
Just a quick notice! I’ve created a new Facebook Group where you can discuss any of the things you see here on the blog, or if you use any of my styles or presets, you can share photos you’ve created using these. You can also use the form to ask questions and get help from other members of the community.
There’s been a few bits of Luminar news coming out recently, and I wanted to try and get it into one single post. There is an update to Luminar 3 and there’s also been some confusion regarding what’s happening with Luminar 4, Luminar Flex and so on. I’ll do my best to answer some of these as best I can with the information that I have.
I’ve often gotten questions from readers as to whether there is any way to use Capture One Express in a similar fashion to Iridient X-Transformer, in order to produce a file that you can then import into Lightroom for further editing. While there is no direct way to do this in the exact same way it is with Iridient X-Transformer, getting these questions did get the cogs in my brain working! I wondered if there was a way one could use Capture One’s flat profile to achieve something similar. So, after spending some time experimenting, I’ve come up with a possible solution. Read on to find out more…
Having worked in both the print, photography and video industries for a long time, I’ve always appreciated the importance of having a properly calibrated display. It can actually make a huge difference, especially if you’re collaborating with others or having you work printed or so on. Over the years I’ve used a variety of calibration tools, and I’ve recently been trying out a new calibration system for my computer, the Datacolor Spyder X.
Adobe today released its August update for the Lightroom family, and it contains a pretty big new feature that people have been requesting for ages. This update finally brings GPU acceleration to image editing.
A while ago I posted an episode of my ongoing “Street Photo Diary” video series on YouTube shot with the original Fuji X-100. The video has attracted quite a few comments, but one recently stood to to me and got me interested. Someone wanted to know could you achieve similar results with an iPhone. I figured you would get broadly similar results, but the quality wouldn’t be quite the same. I was curious to see though, so I set off to find out.
Today Phase One announced the launch of a new campaign to give students a chance to get Capture One pro for a significant discount. Students will be able to save 65% on annual or monthly subscriptions to Capture One Pro.
I’m having a summer sale on all of my Lightroom Presets and on my Capture One styles. There’s up to between 20% and 50% off on various presets and styles. I’ve been running this through July, and now it will continue until the end of August. If you’re looking for some great Capture One Styles or Lightroom Presets, here’s a chance to get them at a good discount.
No matter how good your camera is, or how good your technique is, there are times when you will want to reduce the noise in an image. In many cases the noise reduction in your chosen raw processing software will be enough, but using noise reduction is often a trade off between maintaining detail and suppressing noise in an image.
I’ve seen a few posts lately complaining about new mirrorless cameras not exposing properly compared to what the user is seeing in the EVF. It seems that in a few instances, people are judging exposure purely by what they’re seeing in the viewfinder. Even if you are also using the included light meter, you may still see a different result when looking at images later on your computer. I call this the EVF effect, and if you’re shooting mirrorless, it’s something you need to be aware of.
I wrote a post a while ago about what I felt was the best way to use Luminar Flex with Lightroom. In that post I explained that I use a bit of a roundabout method, by sending the image to Photoshop first. By doing this and using smart objects, you can keep your edits non destructive, so that you can go back and change your image without having to start over. Here is a video version of this tutorial.
