I’ll start by apologising that I wasn’t able to post last week. I simply had too much work to find the time.

This week, after a week of rain here, I thought that I would share a winter image from the Peak District that I’ve just processed. Well, two images to be accurate, because I noticed something interesting.

In this first image, we see the view from Higger Tor. The early morning mist has just begun to clear, and the sun is lighting the clouds. This was shot using a Fuji XT3 and Fuji 10-24 lens at 10mm. It’s a Tripod Mounted Exposure of 1/5 second at f/13.0 and ISO160. I also used a 3-stop reverse ND grad filter on the sky. The RAW processing was done using Capture One followed by the Nik Collection.

In this second image we again have a view from Higger Tor but a little while after the first. The fog is still there but not quite as thick and the sun has turned the sky a lovely yellow. This was captured using a Fuji XT3 with Fuji 10-24 lens at 15mm. It’s also a tripod mounted exposure of 1/20″ at f/13.0 and ISO160. I again used a 3-stop reverse ND grad filter on the sky. This time the RAW processing was using DXO PhotoLab 6 followed by the Nik Collection.

What I found interesting whilst processing these images is how the two RAW converters create a very different look. Capture One seems almost harsh in comparison to the softer DxO PhotoLab processing. The result was that I hardly touched the Capture One image other than for a little dodging and burning. But with PhotoLab I needed more work and a strong contrast adjustment.

I’m not sure which I prefer but I am leaning quite strongly towards PhotoLab as it seems more natural.

Affinity Photo 2

Have you seen that Affinity Photo 2 has been released? Whilst not all the features are photography related, there are a few that I’m very impressed with. If you haven’t seen my review, here is a link to the YouTube video https://youtu.be/0lZij7fA_2s.

I then followed up this week with a video tutorial demonstrating one way to make better use of the non-destructive RAW editing https://youtu.be/Zc3lbiIhFMo, which I used to produce this image.

This was shot on Formby beach at sunset and processed using a technique called Double RAW Processing. Everything was done in Affinity Photo 2 with no plugins involved.

I hope you like today’s images and enjoy the videos.