Lately, I’ve been playing around with Luminar by Macphun. I’ve found that this program reduces the number of my editing headaches. I’ll share a bit of my experience with it, and you can see if it can help solve some of your headaches or challenges as well. Processing is a chore I&r

HDR, or High Dynamic Range, photography is a technique that has been around for decades but really started making waves in the modern digital imaging scene around 2005. It involves combining multiple exposures of a picture, usually taken with a technique known as bracketing, to create one final sing

The simple contrast between light and shadow can have a powerful effect on a photographic image. In fact, quite often you may find that contrast is what inspires you to photograph a particular scene or subject in the first place. Sometimes, however, the contrast of a scene exceeds the ability of you

In this article, I will review the latest version of PaintShop Pro 2018. I have a unique perspective, having used it over 17 years ago for the first time. Let’s see how it fairs now. Please note: this is a Windows-only program. Start of PaintShop Pro (PSP) Approximately 17 years ago I was work

It’s not uncommon for me to sit down at my computer with a memory card full of images and stare blankly at my ever-growing Lightroom catalog while my mind reels at the thought of editing each and every one of them. Many photographers have experienced this phenomenon and there are certainly som

If you haven’t used it before, your first question might be what exactly is Luminar? Simply put, it’s photo editing software designed by Macphun (available now for Windows). It might differ a little bit from other photo editing software that you’ve used because it is a photo editor

Photography has changed an awful lot over the last 100 years. Heck, it’s changed immensely over the last 20 years. Who am I kidding? With the rise of the cell phone, digital photography and social media have changed the industry in countless ways. Images matter I would argue that one thing in

Having spent the past several months traveling extensively to some pretty exciting places, coming back home to small-town suburbia was a rude awakening for me to say the least. I was so used to having interesting subjects – be it people, landscapes, flora and fauna – at my doorstep

Luminar is a powerful, full-featured photo editor, with a massive array of features and editing tools. A great deal of its workflow is built around the fairly simple concept of applying filters. It’s much like the way you might edit a photo in Instagram or other similar programs – but yo

As more and more people take up digital photography and want to get started editing, many are asking the question, are Adobe’s Lightroom and Photoshop my only options? ­­­At ACD Systems, they have their own editing software called ACDSee Ultimate 10, which allows you to do many of

HDR, or high dynamic range, photography gets a bit of a bad wrap. There’s a lot of HDR images online that are heavily processed, look incredibly fake and over-saturated, and consequently, photographers avoid it like the plague. HDR is quite a Marmite thing – you either love it or you hat

Lightroom and Photoshop are by far the two most well-known processing software for photographers, but they aren’t the only options. Several photographers have recently started using CaptureOne or ON1 but recently a new and lesser known software was released called Picktorial (designe

Believe me, I have tried. Over the years, I have tried to wean myself off ACDSee. But, like Al Pacino in The Godfather, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”. ACDSee does what I want it to do and, as a single package, and it does it better than anything else I have found

If you’ve read my articles here on dPS about storage and backup, you’ll know that they’ve mostly been about slightly larger systems with lots of space for people who have lots of data in the form of photographs. It’s been a while, so I thought it might be time to write about

When it comes to noise reduction, you always have two goals. First, obviously, you want to get rid of any digital noise in your picture. But secondly, you want to preserve detail. These often work against each other because increasing noise reduction often leads to a loss of image detail, but if you

In this article, we’ll look at some tips for cropping your images into better compositions. It’s a good tool There’s an adage I learned over a decade ago when I did construction work in the summer that I still try to live by; measure twice, cut once. It’s a fantastic rule of

I honestly can’t remember which brilliant and knowledgeable photographer told me the insightful little tidbit of information below, it was years ago. At any rate, I wish to thank them for the advice. It has helped me to concentrate on my composition and framing my images for storytelling. This

What is a ring light? Even if you don’t know what a ring light is, it is probable that you have seen photos made using them. As the name suggest, they are a light source in the shape of a ring, often, your camera is mounted on the light so the lens points through it. This on-axis lighting pro

Let me take you on a short walk through Lightroom and Photoshop. There are relatively few steps required to process focus stacked images. In a previous article (How to Photograph the Images Needed For Focus Stacking), I went through what I think you will find is the best and easiest way to take the

I’ve been photographing weddings for about nine years now, and I’ve found this to be the most effective and efficient way of designing and delivering a client’s dream wedding album. The method that I am going to describe keeps you in control of the process and still gives