Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
In my latest video, I take you along on a relaxing photo walk through one of my favourite places in Ireland—Glendalough. This stunning glacial valley in the Wicklow Mountains has long been a go-to spot for me, but this trip turned out to be extra special. From misty trails to surprising wildlife encounters, it was the perfect setting for some nature photography and a calming escape into the Irish wilderness.
Every time I go to New York, I end up spending an inordinate amount of time in Grand Central station. Mainly, because we usually end up staying nearby, and it is a handy throughway to other avenues. But it’s also because it’s kind of a magical place. It is like something out of a movie, and it probably has been in many. Every time you walk through it, there are stories happening all around you.
DxO has released DxO PhotoLab 8, the latest version of its RAW image processing and correction software. This update includes several new tools and refinements aimed at providing greater control over the editing process.
A few days ago Apple held its annual iPhone event where they launched the iPhone 16 and 16 pro line, and after trying not to fall asleep after they rehashed the Apple Intelligence stuff from WWDC, I was pleasantly surprised by the new iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max. Strangely though, after the event people on social media were complaining that there wasn’t a real difference between the pro and the normal models. To which I thought: “Were they even watching the same keynote I was?” Because when I watched that segment I thought to myself, this is the most “pro” pro phone Apple has ever released. In fact, I’d go so far as to say, it’s only really now the Pro iPhone has fully earned the “Pro” name.
I’ve finally done it! My first new set of Lightroom presets in nearly five years are now available. As I mentioned in a couple of previous posts, this took a lot of work to get out the door, mainly because I haven’t done one of these sets in so long, but I’m pretty happy with the results, and I hope you will be too!
DXO Pure Raw is a very interesting application. It’s primary purpose is noise reduction, and if you’ve heard of the software, removing noise from an image is probably what you most associate with the software. However, with version 4 they opened up a very interesting alternative use of the application. By allowing you to change the way the algorithm works, you can actually turn the noise reduction down and the detail recovery up, and the result can be a pretty impressive level of detail recovery on the right kind of image. I’ve been trying this a lot recently, and when it works well, I’m really impressed by the results.
Just a quick update on the presets that I posted about last week. I made the cardinal mistake of giving a timeline for these when I wasn’t ready. So, needless to say, I was a bit optimistic when I said that I’d have them out within about a week. It’s taking a bit longer than I had anticipated (it always does) so they’re not quite ready yet! But hopefully not too much longer.
I’m delighted to share some information about a project I’ve been working on for a little while. As long time readers might know, I used to have a selection of Lightroom presets available back when I ran my own download store. Since I closed that in favour of selling on Gumroad, I have only really kept my black and white presets, T-Pan available. I had wanted to bring some of my other presets back for sale again, but when I looked at them I realised that many of them were quite dated. I started by looking to see if I could bring some of these old presets up to date, but I ended up with an entirely new set!
This is kind of a nerdy tip, but if, for whatever reason, you need to copy the settings from the main tone curve in Lightroom to the tone curve on a mask, you may be wondering how to do this, as it’s not immediately obvious. Well, there are actually two ways, and in this post (and video) I show you how to do it.
Ever since Adobe added the new masking architecture in Lightroom a few years ago, it’s totally changed the way I work with the software. I find myself using masks way more than I used to and it’s led to me approaching my edits in a whole different way. To try and take that to the limit, I set out to see if I could edit a photo entirely by just using the masks tool, and not touching the standard editing controls.
After the calamity of Adobe’s recent Terms of Service update (which it turns out wasn’t that recent) they have followed through on their promise of re-writing the terms and adding plain English explanations for the various clauses.
I recently upgraded my photography and video gear with the Canon R6 Mark II. On a trip to Brighton, UK, I tested the camera for the first time. I captured both test footage and stills, creating a short film of a moody morning on Brighton Beach. Additionally, I took a series of still photos throughout the trip, including some beautiful sunset shots.
Ever since Adobe switched to a subscription model many years ago, people have loved to hate them. They often don’t do themselves any favours in the PR department, either. And hot off the heels of their recent PR disaster with the badly worded revisions to their Terms and Conditions, they’re now being sued for the way they handle subscriptions bye the US government.
French software company DXO Labs celebrating its 20th anniversary this month, and to commemorate it they are offering 20% off all of their software for the next 20 days. The company’s first product: DXO Optics Pro, the precursor to DXO Photo Lab launched this month 20 years ago in June 2004. Since then the company has added to its portfolio of photography software, including DXO Pure Raw, the NIK Collection and DXO Film Pack.
A little while ago, we decided to take a few days break away from the hustle and bustle and headed off on an adventure. We wanted to go somewhere out of the way. Where we ended up was probably about as far away as you can get in Ireland without actually leaving the mainland or going on a ferry. For the longest time I had wanted to visit the top of the island, and so my wife booked us into a hotel on the northernmost peninsula not he northernmost county in Ireland: The windswept and very beautiful Inishowen peninsula in Co. Donegal. And what a place it is.
Adobe has announced a new release of Lightroom, and it has the usual bug fixes and new camera support in this release as well as some new features. There’s one new feature which, I think, is probably going to be what most people will talk about with this release; that’s the new generative remove, powered by the companies “Firefly” AI engine.
DXO has just announced the latest release of its popular NIK software collection. The new version features a range of updates across all of its applications, with some interesting new workflow options and a speed increase across the collection.
Back in April my wife and I took a road trip to the northern most region in Ireland, the Inishowen peninsula in Co. Donegal. We were there for a few days and took the opportunity to photograph the northern most point on the island of Ireland, as well as some of the incredible beaches in the area.
