Newcomers to Capture One may be confused by its talk of ‘Sessions’, which are an alternative way of browsing, selecting and editing pictures that’s still available, even though Capture One Pro now offers Aperture and Lightroom style image catalogs. ‘Sessions’ exist because Capture One isn’t just another image cataloguing and editing tool. In fact, its…
Lightroom 5 brought a whole bunch of exciting enhancements, but they weren’t all headline-grabbing editing tools – Adobe also introduced Smart Previews, which could be the most important advance of all for those of use with image collections too large to store on an internal drive. I do my day-to-day work on a laptop with…
HDR Efex Pro isn’t just for special effects. It can enhance your images in much more straightforward ways, improving the tonal balance, sky detail and colour saturation. I like to use it on landscapes, where professionals can wait for hours for the right lighting, but the rest of us have to grab shots when we…
I’ve discovered what I think is a really neat way of producing richer, deeper colours by turning your picture into black and white… well, sort of. If you’ve got an image which needs more contrast, the usual method is to use curves adjustments. But contrast and saturation are linked, so you get more saturated colours…
The Zone System was invented by legendary landscape photographer Ansel Adams. He hit upon the idea of splitting the full range of tones in a black and white image into eleven distinct brightness zones, which he then went on to define very carefully. I’m paraphrasing this from the Wikipedia entry: Ansel Adams’ approach was two-fold….
Export sharpening is a setting that’s often overlooked when you generate images for online or on-screen viewing, but it makes a big difference to how sharp your pictures look. Every time you resample an image, you introduce a degree of blur because the software has to interpolate new pixel values – and this applies when…
If you use Aperture or Lightroom, it’s so easy to export pictures at specific sizes for web use or emailing that you probably don’t give the settings a second thought. But in order to reduce your pictures to the required size, your software has to carry out a resampling process that can leave fine details…
Analog Efex Pro is one of the plug-ins in the DxO Nik Collection. It comes with a selection of preset camera and film effects to reproduce the look of traditional analog photography, but I’ve been spending some time trying them out and using the Analog Efex Pro Camera Kit (see part 2 of this Analog…
Analog Efex Pro is part of the DxO Nik Collection, the set of plug-ins for Photoshop, Elements and Lightroom Classic that DxO took over from Google. I rate this as the best set of plug-ins ever made, and practically a must-have for digital image-editing fans. It’s a tool for simulating the look of old films…
Many photographers are worried that the moment they post their photographs online they’ll be copied and passed off as someone else’s, or used by others without the photographer’s knowledge and permission. I’m sure that does happen, but I also see things from a slightly different perspective. I work on a magazine where we find lots…