When MacPhun (or Skylum, as it is now) updated its innovative photo-editing app to Luminar 1.2 ‘Neptune’, it added a number of new features. One of these is the new Luminar Quick & Awesome workspace, which is designed to bring three key filters for getting awesome results quickly. These are the new Accent – AI Filter which…
This filter was improved in Luminar 1.2 with new Vignette Styles, a Place Center button for off-centre positioning and new Pre- and Post-crop options. Here’s a quick tour: 01 Our start shot This clown sign at a fairground might make a good picture, but there’s a lot of bright and confusing detail in the background….
The Luminar Adjustable Gradient filter is a great tool for all kinds of photography, but for landscapes in particular. It tackles that thorny old problem of bright skies and dark ground and the brightness difference between them. You can fix this at the shooting stage by using a graduated filter on the front of the…
Virtual Copies are really useful. They let you try out a whole load of different processing variations on a single image without having to create new files, saving time and disk space in the process and keeping all your adjustments ‘editable’. But there are drawbacks too. One this that none of your edits are visible…
Pixelmator is an interesting image-editing app for Mac and iOS that I’m always telling myself I should spend more time with. Well I did just that, finding an interesting use for the Pixelmator Kaleidoscope filter. Before we go any further, though, there’s something you need to know (that I wish I’d found out sooner). The…
If you never thought you’d need to pay attention to the Lightroom noise reduction settings, you might need to think again. Like a lot of photographers I shoot RAW files on the assumption I’m going to get better image quality by processing the images myself rather than leaving it to the in-camera JPEG processing. That’s fine…
Here’s a situation where a simple manual focus lens can do something a modern zoom lens can’t. I’ve dug this dusty old Pentax SMC 50mm f/1.7 lens out of the garage to demonstrate it, but there are an increasing number of modern manual prime lenses which can do the same thing – setting the hyperfocal distance….
I was lucky enough to get a Fujifilm GFX 50S on loan for two weeks to review in Digital Camera and Professional Photography and I’m really impressed by the tonal range and subtlety it can capture. This became obvious when I started working on a set of shots from a drizzle-swept day on Exmoor. The sky…
The ‘Pluto’ update to Luminar brought a selection of new tools including a new Golden Hour filter. If you want to know more about it, you can download the Luminar trial version. This filter is designed to simulate the warmth of a late afternoon sun, something which is actually a lot more difficult to do digitally…
Apple Photos is central to both the Mac OS and iOS devices. It’s a great way to keep all your photos to handy on all your devices, and it practically looks after itself – you add a photo on one device, and very soon it’s on all of them. It’s also a pretty good image-editing…