I’ve had a fascination with the Leica ‘look’ ever since I first went on a shoot with a digital Leica M rangefinder. The contrast and colors were exceptionally intense, the M-series lenses added a subtle vignette at wider apertures and there was an intriguing shift in the color palette compared to the clinical accuracy of other cameras.
It sounds nigh-on impossible, but Lightroom’s new AI powered Remove option really can wipe away reflections in glass as if they had never existed. This is something which would be very, very difficult to achieve using regular editing tools. I’ve tried it out on a number of different images and been impressed by just how effective it is.
This post was written soon after the new Distraction tools were added to Lightroom, so some of the issues I talk about may have been solved by the time you read this. This post is for anyone struggling to get the early version working…
Lightroom’s Enhance feature used to create a new (larger) DNG file alongside the original RAW file, but now it doesn’t! That’s huge news for anyone who uses Adobe’s AI denoising tool regularly. Here’s how the new setup works.
So what?, you’re thinking. Why do we need another generic Adobe profile when we can choose one that matches the camera’s own rendition and picture styles, or choose one of Adobe’s many built in black and white, creative, modern or vintage profiles? Well let’s see…
Minimalism, brutalism and architecture, three of my favourite things. So when I got the chance to spend a week in a converted WWII bunker, I spent much of my time exploring the objects, compositions and lighting in this strange but extraordinary environment.
It was a dark, blustery day in May. Bournemouth, on the UK’s southern coastline, was not looking its best. But I didn’t want to try to glamourise it, I wanted to make this place look exactly how it felt on that day – only more so.
So until now I’ve been thinking of dynamic range recovery as being a combination of highlight recovery and shadow recovery. But actually, I’m starting to think that if my highlights are blown, that’s maybe not a dynamic range issue, but an exposure error on my part. I’ll explain what I mean.
Josef Sudek was a photographer from what is now the Czech Republic who had a characteristic style, particularly later in his life, when he drew inspiration from the objects that surrounded him and the effects of light. His images were deep, soft and mysterious. But is it possible to achieve some of that look digitally without producing just a cheap, fake effect?
There comes a time to put the science to one side, to put the histograms and the eyedroppers back in their box, and to step sideways into a very strange and very different analog world. Analog Efex, part of the DxO Nik Collection, goes to places other effects tools don’t go. It’s richer, stranger and more random than just about anything else, and I love it.