Flight From Callahan County

Skylum's Luminar 4 is scheduled for public release next week and has already been made available to those of us who took advantage of a pre-release discount back in July. Opening to mostly rave reviews, this photo editor for Windows and Mac platforms has some great new tools using AI technology, including sky replacement and quick enhancement of faces in portraits. For us black and white enthusiasts, there are also dozens of black and white presets that can be downloaded for use in Luminar. But the latest version continues the company's failure to attend to weaknesses in the emulation of the look of black and white films. This is particularly disappointing since Macphun's Tonality CK plugin for the Mac platform had the best monochrome film presets of any software I have used. I ran a test of several photo editors that reproduce the look of black and white films, comparing their "out-of-the-box" presets for Ilford SFX 200, a black and white film in 120 or ...

ON1 Software’s non-destructive raw photo converter/editor, Photo RAW 2020, is now in public beta with the official release scheduled for next month. I have been using this software for several versions now, and the latest release has some impressive features. Here are the most useful changes I have found: First, the presets in the Browser are either brand new or remodeled previous offerings. After selecting a preset, there’s a slider for controlling the intensity without having to open the Effects module. The black and white film presets appear to have been reworked and much better than those in RAW 2019. Second, the Develop module in much improved. The Auto button does a better job of balancing the contrast in a troublesome image without blowing the highlights. There’s an AI Match option that shows you to change to the look of the image you saw in the camera EVF when you took the picture. After choosing either Auto or AI Match, a master-control slider change...