Life after Photoshop

Tutorials

Capture One has many advantages over Lightroom, and Sessions is one of the biggest

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Capture One and Lightroom both offer image cataloguing tools with powerful organization and search capabilities, but they both rely on an import process. And, if you make changes outside your catalog, you’ll have to synchronize or re-link your image files. Capture One Sessions are different. They are like ‘live’ browsing. And they are not just for tethered shooting.

How the Nik Silver Efex 8 Colour Filter works, with free cheat sheet!

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Like all good black and white photo editing tools, Silver Efex can ‘filter’ the colours in your digital images to translate them into different shades of grey. You can replicate the effect of traditional black and white ‘contrast’ filters, achieving dramatic blue skies with a red filter effect, richer landscape tones with a yellow filter effect and more. Here’s how it works.

Silver Efex 8 Basic Adjustments: what do they do and how – includes a free cheat sheet!

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The Basic Adjustments panel is one of the ‘optional’ Filters in Nik Silver Efex 8. What this means is that if you are building an effect from scratch, you can add it manually from the list of Filters in the left sidebar, or not use it at all. You will find it’s included as standard in many Silver Efex presets, though, and despite being ‘Basic’, it’s actually central to a lot of black and white ‘looks’.

The strange alchemy of Analog Efex Filters, what they do and how they combine

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Analog Efex is one of the creative plug-ins in the DxO Nik Collection and it’s a bit of an outlier because, first of all, it was developed by Google and not Nik Software (it appeared during Google’s ownership of the Nik Collection) and secondly, because it can produce the most amazing results from filters which individually don’t seem to amount to very much. I’ll explain.

How to turn black and white negatives into positives in Adobe Lightroom

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Lightroom doesn’t have a ‘negative’ filter for turning negative images into positives, so how do you do it? I’ve been going through my old mono negatives, rephotographing them with a camera and a macro lens, and I wanted to figure out how to convert them without using an external tool – and here’s how it’s done! (And it should work in any other software with curves adjustments.)

How I make my digital images look more analog

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Digital images don’t look like analog. They just don’t. And it’s not just as simple as changing the colors, adding a sepia tone or applying a vignette, or a frame. There are plenty of programs and plug-ins that can recreate that analog look, or they promise to do that, but often they use very obvious techniques to make pictures look old. I’ve done this lots of times myself, I’ve nothing against this approach. It’s fine if you want to create a very obvious effect, but what I want to do today is different.

Is there a Leica ‘look’, how do you get it, and how much is actually your camera work?

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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.