Polarising filters are often used to darken blue skies. You can do this digitally instead – though polarisers do more besides that you cannot do digitally.
Ideas and effects
It's easy to get stuck in a rut and run out of ideas, so here are a few treatments and editing effects I've tried out over the years, with explanations about how they work and how to replicate them. I hope you find them useful!
Preset picks: Capture One ‘Seasonal’ SN-04
Preset Picks: The SN-04 Style from Capture One’s Seasonal Style pack (sold separately) has a very rich, warm look. Here’s how the Style is created.
Preset picks: Alien Skin Border – Negative (Kodalith)
Preset Picks: This time, Alien Skin’s Border – Negative (Kodalith) preset goes under the microscope. Using just three tools it transforms regular images into super-strong graphic black and white.
SN-05 from Capture One’s Seasonal Style pack
SN-05 is a pretty unromantic name for an image style, but it’s worked quite a transformation on this sunlit winter tree and sky. It’s one of 15 Styles in the Seasonal pack, which is sold via the Phase One website here: Seasonal Styles & Presets for Capture One – Preview Images & Buy The price […]
How to enhance a sunset with white balance and graduated filter adjustments
Sunsets don’t always come out the way you want them to, so here’s a quick way to enhance them with a white balance adjustment and a graduated filter effect. This picture was shot using the auto white balance on a Nikon Z6 and while the colours are a pretty reasonable representation of how the scene […]
Don’t be scared of high ISOs!
Your camera’s sensor, your lens’s image stabiliser and the latest photo-editing software technology may surprise you with what they can do together. When you’re on vacation or on a once-in-a-lifetime trip or just strolling through warm city streets at night, you’re going to want to capture the sights with your camera but you don’t want […]
Try a black and white high contrast Lith effect
One of the reasons I rate image effects programs so highly compared to traditional image editors is the way they open your eyes to effects you wouldn’t have thought of. Like applying the Lith Border effect in Alien Skin Exposure X3 to this early morning shot of a country church. There’s already a lot of […]
Transform tricky shots with tone mapping
Sometimes you get scenes where the brightness range is so great you just can’t bring out all the different tones in the picture. This is lighting problem, not a dynamic range problem. Even if your camera has the dynamic range to capture all the tones in the scene, there’s no way of showing them all. […]