CAPTURE NEW HORIZONS

One of the software programmes I use in conjunction with Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop is Nik suite of filters which includes Color Efex, Silver Efex and Analog Efex. The later give the images an old school film finish and I use this very sparingly as it can be overdone.  However in high contrast light with the right subject the finish can transform an image.   Cars in the pitlane is one subject I tend to run through the Analog Efex filters and this is what I've done with some of the shots I took today during the set up for the 6 Hours of Bahrain this weekend. I have produced and saved several custom filters based on the Classic Camera 4 preset that comes with the programme.  I will tweak my own custom settings to get the effect that suits the subject.  It is very similar to Classic Chrome that comes with the Fujifilm X-T1, X100T etc but I found that Analog Efex gives me more control.  So I tend to set up the shot from the RAW file in Lightroom and then...

Adobe Photoshop has become THE word for any image manipulation software product, much in the same way that Hoover has become the word for a vacuum cleaner of any brand.   However in the past few years Photoshop has also become a negative word for any image that has been manipulated in post production.  The amount of times I have seen or heard the phrase 'Oh, that's obviously been photoshopped!' and I've even had this said about some of my images.  This shows a deep lack of understanding about the photographic process that hasn't really changed for 150 years, it has just become a lot easier with the advent of digital photography and the digital lightroom.   Image manipulation software is an important part of photography, but it is up to the photographer how much or how little they use to get the end result that they are pleased with.  At the end of the day photography is an art form and whether the final image is pleasing to the viewer is subjective....