about software – How to use it, tips, tricks, shortcuts, effects. All those go here.
If you’re a Capture One user, now is the time to upgrade to Capture One 22. The company is offering a discount of 20%, with a potential additional discount if you use our special discount code BPT10.
Read More »Capture One Pre-Upgrade Sale:20%+ OFF. Don’t Miss it
In version 14.2 of Capture One 21, the company removed the tried and tested method of exporting images in favor of an easier-to-use export-window-styled workflow.
The move had a mixed response, with some professional and enterprise-level users claiming that it broke their workflow. Others – most notably beginners – welcomed the more user-friendly ‘export’ button in the toolbar and subsequent windowed dialog workflow.
Now, with version 14.4, the Export Tools Tab is back … if you want it.
Read More »Capture One Brings Back Export Tab in v14.4
Affinity Photo is part of a suite of three apps: Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, and Affinity Publisher made by Serif Europe Ltd. Each serves a different purpose, and combined, they offer a rather complete set of photo editing, graphic design, and desktop publishing tools. Their capabilities rival Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe InDesign respectively.
I’ve been exploring Affinity Photo (AP) as a replacement for Adobe Photoshop (PS), and I’d like to answer some of the questions that I’ve seen being asked quite often on the internet. If you have questions that I have not addressed here, please ask me in the comments. Let’s get started.
Read More »Everything That You Need To Know About Affinity Photo
Capture One just announced that they are working on the ability to merge multiple images into HDRs and to stitch images into Panoramas. This is especially important for the company since new users tend to compare Capture One Pro directly to Adobe Lightroom Classic…
Now, with the announcement that these features are ‘in development’, Capture One seeks to even the playing field in this respect. The company has been on a roll. Earlier this year, they announced a new “Export” interface that caused a little flutter among long-time users, and the Magic Selection Brush, among other improvements.
Read More »Capture One Announces HDR and Panorama Features
Sometimes, Adobe Lightroom can be slow. When you’re working on an image, or when previewing images, there is a lag before the image is previewed. This is an indication that Lightroom is not working as fast as it can be.
Often, a simple configuration change or hardware upgrade can make all the difference.
Read More »How To Make Lightroom Classic Run Faster
Affinity Suite v1.10 has been released today and it comes with significant improvements in performance across the board. All three apps that are designed and built by Affinity will see improvements in some form or the other.
Users of Affinity 1.9 apps will be able to upgrade to version 1.10 for free even though these upgrades are expected to be made paid upgrades in the future.
Read More »Affinity Focuses on Performance – Releases Version 1.10
Affinity Photo is an application that has been spoken of quite highly in the recent past. Affinity by Serif has created a suite of apps that take on Adobe’s stalwarts, Photoshop, Illustrator, and In-Design head-on. While doing so, they’ve added in their own twists, with innovations that will make you smile, and wonder why things weren’t always done this way.
They’re also new to the field, so the apps need to prove themselves before professionals consider switching to Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher full-time. In the meantime, one of the important questions that need to be answered is: Do Affinity Apps support Adobe file formats like .PSD, .AI, .PDF and .EPS which have become industry standards over the course of the last 3 decades or more? Let’s find out…
Read More »How Well Does Affinity Photo Handle Adobe PSD files?
Affinity Photo has a very feature-rich tool that allows you to batch process multiple images in a fast and very efficient manner. In fact, I wished that some of the options that it had were available in Adobe Photoshop too! So, let’s look into how you can use the “New Batch Job…” command that’s in Affinity Photo’s ‘File’ Menu, and let’s also compare it to the tools that Adobe Photoshop has to achieve similar results.
Read More »How to Use Affinity Photo’s ‘Batch Job’
My initial experience with Affinity Photo was a mixture of wonder and disappointment. Wonder, because I loved the way that they had reinvented the photo editing experience (for someone who grew up using photoshop), and that the editing experience could be so different: in some ways better than photoshop. But frequent software crashes spoil the user experience and are never part of the deal that one makes with their tools. Here’s how I figured out why Affinity Photo was crashing, and how I sorted it out.
Read More »Affinity Photo Crashing Frequently? Here’s How To Fix It
Capture One has released their native M1 build for Apple silicon Mac computers as of 27th May 2021. With this release comes various performance enhancements: quicker and more responsive controls, and faster processing of your images.
Read More »Apple M1 Capture One Version Now Ready!
Yes, Photoshop and Lightroom can be replaced in your digital photography workflow, and without any compromises to the quality of your output. Affinity Photo and Capture One Pro are alternatives that are full-featured, professional-grade, and in some instances, even easier to use.
Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom seem to be the stalwarts of the digital photography industry. However, there are robust (and sometimes better) alternatives to these two tools. If you’re looking for other options, there’s a long list of Photoshop and Lightroom replacements at the end of the article.
Read More »Replacing Photoshop & Lightroom in Your Photography Workflow
Photoshop uses a lot of RAM. It will take as much as you can throw its way, and then some more. As a way to use ‘more’ RAM than a computer had available physically, the developers took to creating scratch disks on your Hard Disk Drive (HDD), as an extension of the data that Photoshop held in RAM.
Read More »Optimal Photoshop & Lightroom Setup for SSDs
Recently it was revealed that a few photography related websites had been compromised, and account passwords were leaked to the ‘dark web’. This is really concerning, especially if you re-use your passwords across websites, or if you just make small changes to keep them -sort of- unique. The solution is to use a service that creates long, unbreakable passwords, so that you don’t have to remember them in the first place. Read on to find out if you were affected by these hacks, and how you can ensure that you minimise any possible repercussions.
Read More »Photography Related Sites Hacked! Here’s How To Secure Your Passwords Today
In early 2018, I almost lost all my images (from 2006 to 2014). I also almost all the pictures that my father had taken from 2008 to 2014. Turns out, I didn’t lose them all, but that’s only because of a happy accident. Not everyone has these happy accidents to fall back on.
The question I asked myself was: How could I have been so silly? But a better question was: How could I have avoided the possibility of data loss altogether? And that’s what we’re doing to answer today.
Read More »Back-up Your Files Correctly: The Story of How I Almost Lost All My Photographs
If you don’t do this one thing, you will lose all your edits when your lightroom catalog file gets corrupted.
This is the one setting that I always turn on as soon as I install Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (LR) on any computer: Automatically Write Changes into XMP.
I suggest you do the same because it has saved me many times. I really don’t know why Adobe sets this to ‘off’ by default. It should always be turned on! Here’s how to turn on
Read More »How-to Save RAW File Edits Without a Lightroom Catalogue file