Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
This time last year, I posted a story on this blog called “Virtual Spring”. We were in the midst of lockdown and I couldn’t get out to get any photos of the changing seasons. While autumn has always been my favourite season to photography, spring is a close second. I love as the bleakness of winter gives way to new life, and it clears out the cupboards of one’s mind, as it were.
DXO quietly released the latest update to DXO Photo Lab sometime recently. I don’t know when exactly this was as there was no press release or anything and I wasn’t really paying that much attention to the software update notices, but it’s actually an important release for two reasons. It brings improvements to Fuji support and improves the way Fuji cameras are handled in an important way. It also makes us aware of a bug in the latest MacOS and offers a work around. Read on for more details
If you’re a Fuji shooter, you shoot RAW and use Lightroom Classic, then you probably regularly use the Fuji Film simulation colour profiles when processing your images. However, what if you want to customise those profiles? What if you’re not 100% happy with the colour balance for example, or you’d like to match some customisation options that you’ve set in-camera. Well, it’s actually easy enough to create your own custom versions of these colour profiles and in this video I’ll show you how!
Just a quick PSA - if you’re in the market for a new Adobe subscription, they’re currently offering 20% off the All Apps plan (this is the one I use) in select European, Middle East and Asian countries. Read on for more details.
Capture One has just released a new version of the software with some new features, bug fixes and improvements. This release brings Capture One to 15.2. The big new feature is an AI-based auto-perspective-correction tool, similar to Lightroom’s “Upright” feature. Also included, is an improved auto-straighten tool.
One of the things about Capture One that is both a good and a bad thing about the software, is that there are often many ways to do the same task. While some people like myself, like this about the application, new users often find this frustrating. One good example of this is rotating images. There are so many different ways to rotate images in Capture One and in this video I go through 9 different methods. (Well, I show 8, but I mention a 9th)
We recently decided to head out to the mountains to photography a nice spring day in national park in Glendalough, Co. Wicklow, but when we got there a cloud had descended. Long with the still bare moss covered trees, our jaunt in the sun became a trip into a fantasy story in a mysterious forested land…
Since the Mac studio was released by Apple a few weeks ago, we’ve seen lots of enthusiasm around the product from many creative professionals. However, we’ve also seen the obligatory round of “You don’t need it” posts from people about why the Mac Studio is “too much computer” for many folks. This has been particularly prevalent in the photographic community, with some prominent pundits in articular lecturing their readers as to why they shouldn’t get the Mac Studio for photography.
Ever since it came out last week, I’ve been getting lots of questions about Pure Raw 2. I had outlined a first look at the software last week, both here and on my YouTube Channel, and I’ve had lots of comments and queries on various aspects of the application. So, I thought I’d try and address some of the key things people had questions about in this post.
Today DXO Labs announced the release of the second version of DXO Purer Raw. In case you haven’t heard of Pure Raw before it’s DXO Labs’s Raw pre-processing software. It allows you to take advantage of the company’s excellent Ai-based noise reduction and demosiacing technologies, while still using your favourite editing application. The new release adds to major new features: Fuji X-Trans support and much improved workflow options.
I don’t think I’ve ever been as excited about an Apple announcement as I was this week after Apple’s March 2022 event. And all that excitement comes form just one part of the presentation: the announcement of the Mac Studio. For me, the Mac Studio is the ultimate Mac for what I do, and it is something I think many creators like myself have wanted for a long time.
Yesterday, Capture One showed off the iPad version of Capture One for the first time. In a livestream on their YouTube channel, David Grover, showcased the interface of the new software. Here are some thoughts on what we saw.
Capture One (the company) has added a new post on its website about its vision for the future of its software (also Capture One). The company has outlined its path to creating a whole ecosystem for professional photographers. This starts with Capture One Pro on the desktop, and the recently released Capture One Live, and encompasses future plans which include Capture One on the iPad and eventually iPhone.
A few years ago, I was pretty heavily invested in the whole world of Fujifilm cameras. However, since my X-Pro 2 broke a few years ago, I haven’t had the time or the finances to replace or repair it, and so I’ve fallen out of regularly covering Fujifilm topics.So recently, I decided I was going to get one of the latest Fuji cameras to re-immerse myself in the ecosystem. But then the conundrum came – which Fuji camera to get?
Over the past few years, or even the last decade, journalism has taken a real hit from the general public. Between prognostications that smartphones and social media would kill off the need for photojournalists, to attacks on journalism in general from political bloviators. But the awful events in Ukraine over the past week show that Journalism and PhotoJournalism are as effective and as important as ever.
Yesterday (Feb 21st) Sigma officially announced that it would start releasing lenses for Fuji’s X-Mount. The initial lenses to be released would be a trio of f/1.4 primes that already exist for other mounts. These are a 16mm, 30mm and 56mm. While this has been rumoured for a while, it’s an interesting development, as these lenses are well regarded on other platforms.
While my wife and I have travelled throughout the world, there are large parts of Ireland we haven’t visited. People often ask us about various famous locations around the country and we have to respond that we’ve never been. When Covid struck, and the world turned upside down, we aimed to fix that and began exploring our own little nation that much more. Last year we visited the southeast, and a few weeks ago, we decided to spend a little time exploring part of the west coast, and drove some of the famous “Wild Atlantic Way”.
If you’re a Fuji shooter who regularly uses different film simulation modes when shooting with your Fuji camera, then you may also want to regularly try different film simulations when working on your RAW files. Lightroom has profiles for all of the film simulations that come with various fuji cameras, but to get to them you have to go into the profile browser. While this is fine, you can actually make access to these a little easier, and there are two ways of doing this.
