Photo Software News: Capture One Offer, Luminar, On1, Sony and More
There’s been a good bit of photo software news over the past week so rather than doing lots of separate posts, I thought I’d cover it here in one section. The headlines: Skylum shows off AI Portrait enhancer coming in Luminar 4, Phase One announced a new offer for Capture One, Exposure announced some details of Exposure 5, and a useful piece of software for Sony and Olympics shooters who want to use Pixel Shift.
AI Portrait and AI Skin Enhancer in Luminar 4
Skylum continued its roll out of the new features coming to Luminar 4 and this time they are focusing on portraits. The new AI Portrait enhancer makes it much easier to work with portrait images, by letting AI take care of the hard work for you. It automatically detects faces, and provides a range of tools for enhancing portrait images. As I don’t shoot a lot of portrait photos, this isn’t something that I would normally be excited about, but it does look impressive from the demos they showed, at least from a technological point of view.
You can read more about it on the Skylum website, and they also posted a video showing it in action.
Luminar 4 should be available in the Autumn and you can pre-order now.
New Capture One Offer for September
Phase One announced a new deal for potential Capture One buyers. Any customer who purchases a Capture One Pro product in the Capture One Store will receive a bonus gift card valid for the next purchase. The value of the card will depend on the value of the purchase - the bigger the purchase, the higher the value of the gift card.
The gift card is applicable to specific Capture One Pro products available in the Capture One Store, including upgrades, Capture One (for Sony), and Capture One Fujifilm. The gift card cannot be applied to the purchase of monthly subscriptions. The gift card is valid until January 31st, 2020.
More details are available on their store (you have to wait a little while for the pop-up to come up once you visit the store)
On 1 Raw 2020 Public Beta is out
On1 has announced that the next version of their editor, On1 Raw is now available as a public beta. Anyone who’s been following this blog for a while knows that I’m not a fan, but I’m always willing to give companies a chance, and I’ll be testing out the new version. I’ve already had a quick look though, and it doesn’t seem to address my previous issues. In my opinion, it’s still particularly bad for Fuji Shooters (I think it’s actually worse than Lightroom) but it has a few loyal fans, so if you’re interested in trying it, the beta is free for 30 days.
Exposure 5 Details
A while ago I reviewed Exposure 4, and while I thought it was fine, I had one big issue with it, and that was the lack of a proper lens correction tool. Well, I’m happy to report that the next version, Exposure 5 will finally be getting this feature. I’ve had exposure 4.5 for a while to try to (they sent it to me) but I just can’t find a way to integrate it into my workflow. It’s not that it’s a terrible application or anything, it’s just not something that I ever think of going out of my way to use. I’m keen to try the next version though, as Exposure has a long history and I’d like to see them do well and I’m looking forward to trying it.
PixelShift2DNG
The people who make Fast Raw Viewer have announced a handy utility called PixelShift2DNG. If you’re a Sony shooter (or Olympus) and you want to use the Pixel Shift functionality, the only way (as far as I know) currently is to use Sony’s Image Edge software. This isn’t the greatest application ever made, and so many people would prefer to be able to use their normal editing software.
The PixelShift2DNG utility allows you to combine your Pixelshift images into a DNG file which you can then edit in your software of choice.
Cover Image by Lora Ohanessian via Unsplash
Note: this post contains some affiliate links.
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