Flight From Callahan County

 The folks at Skylum Software have released what they call an Early Access Version of Luminar NEO to customers who have advanced-purchased this new software. This decision puts Skylum in the category of software publishers who promote public "beta" testing of forthcoming versions. Serif's Affinity products and Computer Insel's PhotoLine are two apps testing this way for a long time. Skylum's primary purpose of Early Access is to seek feedback on their Relight AI, Dust Spot Removal AI and Power Lines Removal AI features. In addition, the early access will help quiet criticism of the company for failing to meet the earlier announced release time of last month. For those of us eager to get our hands on the product, it's a chance to finally see how at least part of the product will work. Early Access is missing layers and numerous other features coming later, but based on my experience with free stock photos and my own raw images shot with Olympus cameras, I am im...

I have always been a fan of Olympus cameras. My first was an OM-2, a 35mm film camera that was part of what was known as the OM-System. I owned three the OM-System cameras over the years. In addition to small size, a key factor in the success of the OM-System was the quality and variety of lenses. My favorite lens was the 100mm f2.8, rendering beautiful bokeh perfect for portraits. All of these lenses were manual focus. With the decline of film, I moved to the Olympus 4/3 format camera, a digital SLR that introduced me to auto focus. I had the E-420, then an E-620 before Olympus and Panasonic launched micro four thirds. The technical advancements are marvelous, and I am now shooting with an EM-1 Mark III and an MFT PEN-F with fast autofocus prime and zoom lenses. But I miss some of those OM-System lenses, even though they were only manual focus. I recently found a bargain on an Olympus OM-System Zuiko 50mm f2 Auto-Macro lens. Here's an image shot with that lens adapted for use on a...

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 ...