Amongst the new features introduced with Lightroom Classic CC and Lightroom 6 was the ability to merge panoramas from a series of overlapping frames, without the need for Photoshop. But is it as good at merging images? Let’s see. Panoramas are easy to shoot. A tripod is good, but not essential. The main thing you…
Color Efex Pro, part of the DxO Nik Collection, is a terrific plug-in with an amazing array of filter effects, each of which has its own controls. Some of them have uses which are obvious straight away, but some… well, not so much. So now and again I have a trawl through the list to…
There’s something odd about the way Capture One crops certain RAW files. Now and again, when you select the crop tool, you’ll see that Capture One has chosen a default crop that’s actually smaller than the full image area. This might seem like a minor operational annoyance and that you just need to recrop manually,…
Apple Photos has some useful editing tools already, but with the launch of the El Capitan operating system, Apple has gone a step further with Apple Photos Extensions. These are equivalent to the the image-editing plug-ins used with Photoshop and Lightroom. Software publishers have been keen to make use of this, and already there are a…
Here’s a technique I use quite often to add a little extra drama and contrast to a scene. I use a graduated filter effect to darken the sky, and then a second graduated filter to darken the foreground. Using two graduated filters creates a powerful lighting effect and increases the tonal contrast of the picture…
I don’t really like Lightroom folders and collections, or at least the way they (don’t) work together in Lightroom Classic CC. Quite often, you can be browsing photos in a collection and wish you could quickly see the rest of the pictures in the same folder. Or you might be looking at pictures in a…
The Clarity slider in Lightroom Classic and Lightroom CC adds a powerful localised contrast effect that can work well on colour shots, but really comes into its own with black and white. It recaptures the some of the punchiness of old black and white films without pushing the overall contrast out of control. Here’s an…
If you’re anything like me, you spend a lot of time dabbling with one special effect, moving on to another image, trying another effect and keep on experimenting without a specific aim in mind. Wouldn’t it be better to put the effects you like already to some constructive use, rather than continually roaming your effects…
Despite the name of this site, I’ve got nothing against Photoshop! Even if it doesn’t have all the effects filters and organising tools you might be looking for (hence this site), it’s still worth having in your software armoury, especially if you get a good deal on an Adobe Photoshop CC subscription. Photoshop has limitations,…
We’ve all been there. You’ve got a shot that’s fundamentally sound but lacks rich, strong colours or any kind of atmosphere. They can be tricky to fix and you can spend hours experimenting with settings that don’t seem to get you any closer – and you don’t want to resort to flashy and obvious effects…