Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
One of the things that you may not know is that Lightroom preset files are actually fairly easy to edit outside of Lightroom. The .lrtemplate files are just plain text files formatted as XML code. So, while not for the faint-hearted or technically challenged, if you know what you’re doing, you can actually open the files in a text editor and make changes. Obviously, you don't need to use BBEdit for this, any high-quality text editor will work.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock the last few days, you’ve undoubtedly read about the updates to Lightroom, specifically the split into two versions. I’m swamped with a client job at the moment (some design work) and so I haven’t had the time to devote as much to checking out the new versions as I would like. With that in mind, I will have a more detailed analysis on the Adobe announcements next week, once I’ve done thorough testing, but for now I wanted to give you my first thoughts.
Today Ireland is bracing for the impact of one of the worst storms ever to hit the country. As I sit here typing this, there’s a weird eery calm outside. While Ireland has its fair share of bad weather, we have a generally calm climate compared to other parts of the world, and extreme weather events are quite rare. The weather forecasters are saying that this storm, ex-hurricane Ophelia, will be the worst in 50 years. They are also saying that it is in many ways unprecedented and that the country hasn’t experienced anything like this before.
A while ago I wrote about a handy little utility that I use now and again for blogging called Photobulk. It’s a little application that allows you to quickly batch process images in order to resize and add watermarks. It’s useful if you’re blogging photographs that you’ve created in applications such as Apple Photos that doesn’t create watermarks. A new version has just been released which adds some new features and a new interface.
Iridient X-Transformer is finally out of beta and version 1.0 is now available to download from the company’s website. The updated version is mainly just bug fixes from beta 4 but it also includes support for the X-E3.
As anyone who has followed my blog for a while knows, I often use lots of different applications for processing my photos. This leads to the obvious conundrum of how to manage the final images. I like to keep a single library with exported Jpegs of everything, so that if anything happens I have a backup, but also so that I can easily use the files online, on social media, or easily find images for a project or client. I currently have two ways of doing this, one using Mylio, and the other using Apple Photos.
The next version of the On1 Raw application, called On1 Photo Raw 2018 has just been released as a beta, and I thought I’d give it a spin. Longtime readers of my blog will know I haven’t exactly said kind things about the previous version, but I have an open mind, and I would really like to see an improvement. The new version offers a host of new features and improvements, but I was most curious to see if it addressed some of my biggest issues with the last version. Here’s what I found.
I was having an impromptu photowalk the other day and I decided to record my progress with a GoPro mounted to the camera’s hot-shoe. This is the result! I started out with the intent of doing some street photography, but I ended up walking around a local park, because the Autumn colours were so nice, and the light was just right too.
Autumn is now in full flow and it really is my favourite time of the year for photography. The Autumn light in Ireland is beautiful. The slow change of the seasons starts to bring a warm and golden light to the country as the sun is lower and lower in the sky. Throughout the season this effect becomes more and more profound. Combined with the colours this can make for some great Photography.
I’ve been talking about working with Fuji Jpeg files a lot recently, and I wanted to show one way in which I regularly work with them, and that is to use Apple’s Photos application. So, in this video, I take a look at how I go about editing Fuji Jpeg files in Apple’s Photos Application on the mac.
Recently someone asked me how I went about taking certain shots, and I thought it would make an interesting article. I was also in the process of writing something similar for my upcoming Fuji Jpeg book, and so, this post is an early excerpt from that guide (it may well change before I’m finished) on how I go about shooting with my X-Pro 2.
In this short quick tip for Capture One, I look at how to use the purple fringing control to get rid of chromatic aberration that’s not addressed by the normal aberration correction tool.
Apple’s High Sierra operating system is now available, and with it comes some changes to Apple’s Phots application. Most of these were previously announced, so not much of this will probably be a surprise at this stage. However, as I’ve just upgraded my laptop, I thought I’d take it for a quick spin to see if anything stood out. I’ve only been using it for a few hours now, so I’ve probably missed a few things, but anyway, here it goes…
You may have read this already, but if you’re a mac user considering upgrading to High Sierra, and you use a Wacom Tablet, then don’t. The company has announced that the system will require a new driver and that won’t be ready until the end of October.
I’ve mentioned before about how much of a fan I am of Macphun’s Luminar, but that I prefer using as a plug-in rather than with raw files. However, there is one exception to that, and that is when I use it with DNGs created by Iridient X-Transformer. In that case the results are actually really great, so I made a little video to demonstrate.
In case you missed this on my store blog, I’m having a half price sale on some of my Lightroom Presets at the moment. In order to celebrate the arrival of Autumn, my favourite time of the year for photography, I’m reducing the price on a selection of my Lightroom Presets by half.
Because I have written a lot on various different software applications regarding raw conversion for Fuji shooters, I often get asked what I think is the best option. This is a difficult question, as they all have their pros and cons. In the past, I have done various breakdowns explaining what I see as the advantages and disadvantages of each. I’ve tried to avoid giving my own take, as I know people’s needs and opinions are different. However, I still get regularly asked, and just today I got another request for an opinion. So here it goes…
I recently had the opportunity to borrow a friends Hasselblad, and so in order to make the most out of it, I headed to one of my favourite places in the country, Glendalough. I haven’t shot with a medium format film camera before, and I didn’t want to waste too much film, so I brought my X-Pro2 with me aswell, and actually ended up shooting most of the images on that.
