Lightroom’s Graduated Filter tool is great. It’s designed to replicate the effect of real-life graduated filters in landscape photography, reducing the brightness of skies so that there’s less of a contrast difference with the landscape itself. It’s not much good if the sky is so overexposed that there’s no detail left, but if you shoot…
The old-fashioned art of black and white photography went far beyond the initial picture-taking. Another, equally important creative process took place in the darkroom, where the image was dodged and burned to enhance the tones and concentrate the viewer’s gaze on the subject and composition. Dodging and burning is a bit of a lost art….
The technical explanation of Lightroom’s Clarity slider is that it increases localised contrast to make objects, shapes and outlines stand out more clearly. The pictorial effect is that your images gain extra ‘punch’, but without pushing the overall contrast levels too high. It’s especially effective when the lighting is quite flat and lifeless, and I’m…
Capture One Pro 7 is a big upgrade on the previous version, and one of the biggest additions is the built-in library function. It now works just like Adobe Lightroom, storing all your images in a searchable database, complete with Lightroom-style Collections and Smart Collections. You can also use it in offline mode. This means…
In the days of film you could rely on emulsions like Fuji Velvia and Kodachrome to exaggerate and intensify the colours of a sunset, but today’s digital cameras deliver a more accurate rendition… which can also be quite disappointing. This picture is a good example. Admittedly, the conditions weren’t ideal for sunsets – it was…
Lightroom looks and feels a lot like Lightroom 4, but there are some key new features. One of these is the new Upright tool, which can automatically correct perspective problems in shots of buildings and other rectangular objects. Note: In the latest versions of Lightroom, the Upright tools are now found in the Geometry panel….
Capture One Pro 7 is not just an excellent RAW converter. Like Adobe Lightroom it has some quite sophisticated adjustment controls. In particular, the Capture One High Dynamic Range sliders are very good at extracting the maximum latent highlight and shadow detail in RAW files. This is not HDR in the usual sense, where you…
Color Efex Pro 4, part of the DxO Nik Collection, is a single plug-in that consists of a huge library of special effects – these are displayed in a long vertical list on the left side of the screen. And in true Nik style, it shows you how your pictures can look before you even…