Exposure X7, just launched, has a new Selection tool that can follow the outlines of complex objects with little effort. It sounds familiar, but Exposure X7’s approach is powerful, controllable and has real hidden depths.
Battery Point lighthouse. Using Lightroom Classic’s Profiles, Color Grading, Post Crop Vignetting and Radial Filter tools to create a strong black and white image.
This black and white image uses two beautiful things: a fabulous portrait shot by Albert Dera on Unsplash and one of ON1 Photo RAW’s excellent B&W Modern presets. Portrait images don’t always convert well to black and white, but this one works brilliantly, thanks in part to the perfect portrait lighting, the strong, symmetrical composition…
Color is a complex thing. It doesn’t get its intensity solely from saturation, but also from contrast. This can include color contrast with colors on opposite sides of the color wheel, brightness contrast between bright and dark colors, and another type of contrast we can call ’saturation contrast’. This is where you contrast strongly saturated…
This is a great tool when you’re working with lenses that suffer from vignetting. Most modern lenses are pretty good in this respect and Capture One will usually have a lens profile that corrects vignetting and distortion and chromatic aberration at the same time. But if you’re working with older vintage lenses, or cheap lo-fi…
The Replace Color filter is a new feature in ON1 Photo RAW 2021, though it will be a familiar option to many users of Photoshop and other programs. It does exactly what it says, allowing you to select a color in the image and replace it with another.
The new Dehaze slider in Capture One 21 shares the same name as the tool in Lightroom, and the same aim – to reduce atmospheric haze in outdoor shots and restore contrast and depth. Capture One 21 does this using some advanced algorithms and a ‘matrix’ of adjustments which aren’t disclosed. Lightroom appears to use…
The Lightroom Dehaze tool is very powerful – often too powerful. It increases local contrast but also makes images darker and more saturated. It’s often better used with local adjustments and not on the whole image.
You can use Aurora HDR 2019 as a standalone program, but if you have Lightroom it’s a lot easier and more efficient to launch it from Lightroom as a plug-in. You can use Aurora HDR with Lightroom very easily, but the method is not the same for single images and bracketed exposures.
Balancing rocks on Poltesco beach, Exposure X5: When I saw this balancing pile of rocks, I was sure I could make a picture out of it, with the pebble beach in the foreground and the silvery sea and sky in the background.