If you never thought you’d need to pay attention to the Lightroom noise reduction settings, you might need to think again. Like a lot of photographers I shoot RAW files on the assumption I’m going to get better image quality by processing the images myself rather than leaving it to the in-camera JPEG processing. That’s fine […]
Tutorials
How to set the hyperfocal distance with a manual lens
Here’s a situation where a simple manual focus lens can do something a modern zoom lens can’t. I’ve dug this dusty old Pentax SMC 50mm f/1.7 lens out of the garage to demonstrate it, but there are an increasing number of modern manual prime lenses which can do the same thing – setting the hyperfocal distance. […]
Fine art black and white with the Fujifilm GFX
I was lucky enough to get a Fujifilm GFX 50S on loan for two weeks to review in Digital Camera and Professional Photography and I’m really impressed by the tonal range and subtlety it can capture. This became obvious when I started working on a set of shots from a drizzle-swept day on Exmoor. The sky […]
Skylum Luminar Golden Hour filter
The ‘Pluto’ update to Luminar brought a selection of new tools including a new Golden Hour filter. If you want to know more about it, you can download the Luminar trial version. This filter is designed to simulate the warmth of a late afternoon sun, something which is actually a lot more difficult to do digitally […]
How to duplicate pictures in Apple Photos
Apple Photos is central to both the Mac OS and iOS devices. It’s a great way to keep all your photos to handy on all your devices, and it practically looks after itself – you add a photo on one device, and very soon it’s on all of them. It’s also a pretty good image-editing […]
Black and white filters in digital imaging
Why would you use colour filters when you’re shooting in black and white? It’s so that you can control the way different colours translate into shades of grey. For example, if you shoot through a red filter, it blocks colours other than red, so that opposite colours, like blue skies, for example, come out much […]
Shadow and Highlight recovery in Lightroom
It’s very easy to lose extreme shadow or highlight detail when you’re shooting high-contrast scenes, and that’s one of the reasons for shooting raw files – they contain additional highlight detail, especially, that you may be able to bring out during processing. Shadow and highlight recovery is not always possible, but I usually reckon that […]
Learn better black and white photography – with your phone
The way that certain cameras feel and work and operate lends them to a certain kind of photography. And for me, the iPhone is perfect for high-contrast, graphic black and white images. True, the image quality is some way short of what you’d get from a ‘proper’ camera, but when I’m using it I see […]
Get better Lightroom HDR with the help of HDR Efex Pro
The Lightroom HDR tools built in are good in their way, but will only get you so far. Yes, you can boost the shadows, reduce the highlights, add some Clarity and Dehaze and maybe a graduated filter for the sky, but you can end up doing a lot of work only getting half way to the […]
6 tips for getting an authentic analog film effect
Modern cameras can reproduce the world with utter, clinical accuracy. The trouble is, it turns out that’s not what we wanted after all. A lot of the time, what we actually want is the faded, distressed, imperfect look of analog photography. So here are six top tips for getting that analog film effect ‘look’ with […]