Here are the photography software that we personally use and strongly recommend:

Adobe Lightroom & Photoshop:

Unquestionably, the most popular and powerful photography software that we recommend is Adobe’s Lightroom (includes Lightroom Classic and Lightroom) and Photoshop, which can be purchased individually or as a package.

Lightroom Classic is the most used photography software that manages the full photography process: Firstly, it imports your photos from your memory card and saves them into correct locations. Secondly, it helps select your favorites, organize them and add tags. Thirdly, its powerful and simple to use develop module allows you to edit your photos with easy controls. Finally, with the export module, it creates a final image in the correct formats for social media, web upload or print.

Lightroom is the cloud companion to Lightroom Classic: You can synchronize your collections from Lightroom Classic to the cloud and then view & edit these photos in Lightroom from any device (smartphone, tablet, Apple TV, etc.) Lightroom can also be used to edit your photos that you take with your phone.

Photoshop doesn’t need much introduction as it’s the most powerful photography editing software around. It works perfectly hand in hand with Lightroom, as LR can send photos to Photoshop for advanced edits and Photoshop sends the photo back to Lightroom once you’re done.

For all photography enthusiasts and pro’s, we recommend at least Lightroom Classic & Lightroom. Photoshop is for those who need more features such as removing objects, working with layers and more advanced editing.

At the time of writing this article, the prices and package options for Switzerland are as below:

You can register to our Lightroom course or to our Photoshop course to learn how to use these super useful software.

Try / Download Adobe Lightroom & Photoshop

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Jpeg Mini (Mac / Windows)

This tiny software saves us hours of time by resizing multiple images and videos via drag-drop, while keeping the image quality high. It also has plugins for Photoshop, Lightroom and Capture one – so when you export from these programs, they use Jpeg mini’s algorithm to create the minimum file size possible for the resolution you need.

Absolutely recommended time saver!

Jpeg Mini Website

Luminar Neo:

Luminar Neo offers a vast scope for editing in a stylish and attractive package that’s designed specifically for photographers. It’s pretty swift for the most part, and includes many AI-based tools that aim to make complex tasks much easier.

It can both function as a standalone application for both Windows and macOS that aims to replace Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop in your workflow, but also can work alongside these rival applications as a plugin. As well as extensive editing tools – often powered by AI algorithms – and a very generous selection of easy-to-use preset looks, Luminar Neo also includes some limited organizational capabilities.

Key features:

• Either replace Lightroom & Photoshop or use it as a plugin (Photo browsing, photo selection, layers, masking, image manipulation, etc)
• Dozens of built-in presets to get your editing started, with many more available for purchase
• Many AI-powered tools like noise reduction, upscaling and background removal
• Supports multi-shot techniques like HDR, focus stacking and panoramas (our preferred app for HDR)
• Available for both Windows and macOS
• You don’t have to subscribe, you can purchase with a one time payment for perpetual licensing

You can use the code spcluminar to get 10% off.

Nik Collection by Dxo

Nik Collection by Dxo offers an extensive suite of powerful plugins that seamlessly integrate with popular editing software like Lightroom and Photoshop.

The eight Nik apps each serve a specific purpose, providing editing tools that aren’t available in Raw workflow suites. Our favorites:

• Analog Efex Pro: Film and motion effects that emulate vintage photo equipment
• Color Efex Pro: Provides a vast array of filters and effects for color photos (our favorite: Pro Contrast filter is included here)
• Silver Efex Pro: Black & White conversion app where you can simulate filters or imitate the look of a specific film like Agfa, Fujifilm, Ilford, Kodak, etc.
• Others: Dfine, HDR Efex Pro, Perspective Efex, Sharpener Pro, Viveza

The recent updates in Nik Collection 7 have introduced significant improvements, notably in the U-Point technology, allowing for more precise and intuitive local adjustments . These enhancements facilitate a more streamlined and effective editing workflow, which is invaluable for both novice and experienced photographers.

Furthermore, the collection’s user-friendly interface and non-destructive editing capabilities encourage experimentation without compromising the original image quality.

By incorporating Nik Collection into their post-processing toolkit, you can achieve professional-grade results and develop a distinctive photographic style without a steep learning curve.

Click here to try / download, use our code PAR_SPC25 to get 10% off.

Capture One:

If you are an advanced photographer who prefers accurate controls of colors and use tethering quite often, you might prefer Capture One to Lightroom.

PhotoDeck for Portfolio Websites:

This is our recommended service to host your photos, share online galleries with clients and sell them online. Some advantages that we love:

• Sync your photos directly from Lightroom, easiest way to keep your website updated
• Share galleries, let your customers select favorite photos
• Your clients can order digital downloads and prints (on paper or mounted) directly from the website
• Multi-language option – your clients can see the website in the language that they prefer: perfect for Switzerland.
• Made in France (not in the US!) so European laws, VAT rules and suppliers are taken into account.

Use the code YG@UPTVNL to get 50% off your first month.

Also make sure to check our article about how to create a photography website.

The post Best photography software for photographers appeared first on Swiss Photo Club Blog.

Generative Remove:

After a long wait, Adobe has finally announced the first-ever generative AI in Lightroom with Generative Remove.

With this tool, you are now able to remove anything in your photo with one touch, using AI technology. Previously, this was only possible in Photoshop, so we are now very happy to see it in Lightroom.

Here is how it works:

1. In the Develop module, select Remove (Eraser icon) > Generative AI:

2. Brush over the object you want to remove. Adjust the brush Size and the overlay Opacity to select with precision. Use Add or subtract after making the selection to refine. In the photo below, there is someone in front of my camera that blocks the full view of the dancers:

3. Final result is quite impressive:

Lens Blur:

AI-powered Lens Blur is now available in Lightroom Classic. Quickly add aesthetic blur and bokeh effects to your photos and achieve a professional look by using adaptive presets. You can also batch copy-paste Lens Blur settings to achieve a consistent look.

• You no longer need a special lens, a specific phone, or the right setting to achieve the popular blurred look​
• Blur any part of the photo by controlling the depth of field
• 7 new Lens Blur presets automatically apply blur on portraits, cityscapes, and street/urban photography​
• Create a preset of a Lens blur effect you like and apply it to more photos in the future

Let’s work on the photo above where I could not isolate the spectators close to the dancers as there were almost the same distance vs the couple.

Lens blur > Apply. It takes a few seconds to detect the subjects in the photo. Unfortunately, it didn’t work very well on the first try:

In these cases, I recommend using the Visualize depth and then focus range to select only what you want in focus, then make sure the remaining is “blue”:

This looks much better but the male dancer’s suit is being blurred and the lady on the left is still too much in focus.

So here, I used the “focus” brush to paint his suit and the “blur” brush to paint the lady on the left:

Final Result:

I hope you find these new changes useful! We have already updated our Lightroom course materials with these newest features. Check out the upcoming classes in your region at our course page:

The post Lightroom: New Generative AI and Lens Blur features appeared first on Swiss Photo Club Blog.

Here’s a step by step guide:

How to remove noise from images using AI-powered Denoise by Lightroom Classic v12.3

Open the RAW version of your photo. From the menu, select Photo > Enhance or select Denoise in the Develop / Detail panel.

Select Denoise in the Detail panel to reduce noise.

Select Denoise to enhance your image.

Holding Alt or Option while selecting Denoise from the Detail panel will set the intensity of the slider to the last set Amount value.
You can press and hold on to the preview area to view the changes made to the image.

Click Enhance to process the image as a new DNG file.

The enhanced image is saved as a new DNG file with the filename in this format: <Original filename-Enhance-NR.DNG> and is placed next to the source image. 

If you would like to learn about all the important features of Lightroom in person, checkout our Lightroom full day course or book a private course with us. We will cover all you need to know plus our recommended workflow and file handling strategies.

The post Remove noise from your photos with Lightoom’s AI-Denoise appeared first on Swiss Photo Club Blog.

One area of technology that’s particularly exciting for photography is the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this blog article, I am looking at how AI is changing the world of photography, and how you can harness its power to make your life with a camera easier and more enjoyable in 2023.

AI-Powered Bokeh

If you own one of the latest iPhones or Android smartphones, you’ve probably already been taking advantage of AI photography without even realizing it.

By using 2 or more cameras, modern smartphones can artificially replicate the out of focus areas (bokeh) of an image shot with a lens at a shallow depth of field.

This artificial blurring of the background mimics the effect we’d usually see from a dedicated camera and specialist lens – the fact that you can replicate this look surprisingly realistically using your tiny phone camera is impressive and can fool even the trained eye.

From a technical perspective, blurring the background can help to separate your subject from an otherwise distracting background. It can also give your photo that ‘high-end’ look normally associated with fancy cameras.

AI-Powered Autofocus

DSLRs, mirrorless cameras and mobile devices have been using facial recognition for several years now, but recently, AI-based real-time autofocus has become available and it’s surprisingly good.

Cameras such as the Nikon Z6 or Z7 offer auto-focus that’s one of the fastest on the market, aided by artificial intelligence and real-time tracking for photos and videos. It can track birds’ and animals’ eyes and even keep up with erratic human eye movement.

Nikon, Canon and the other major brands also offer cameras with ground-breaking AI autofocus to make your life as a portrait, wedding, sports or wildlife photographer even easier.

Speaking from personal wedding photography experience, my switch from a DSLR to a mirrorless camera with eye-AF was an absolute gamechanger. No longer do I ‘chase’ the bride’s eyes across my frame with the camera’s AF buttons – I simply point the camera in the right direction and AI does the focusing for me.

AI Cameras & Hardware

Arsenal is an ‘intelligent camera assistant’ that helps you capture amazing photos without any prior advanced photography knowledge.

In other words, it makes taking photos easier – much easier. Some might even call these magical AI capabilities cheating, but there aren’t any rules surrounding how you get a great photo, so why not take advantage of what this technology offers?

Artificial intelligence can be found in security and surveillance cameras, used to detect people, packages, animals and vehicles.

It’s also appearing in various smartphone accessories, such as the Alice Camera, which promises to convert your smartphone into a DSLR with machine learning.

Then there’s the Olympus OM-D E-M1X, one of the first cameras that features Deep Learning Technology to identify subjects and learn how to better track them.

AI Photo Culling and Image Selection

This is an area of AI that should really excite anyone who deals with large quantities of images – wedding and event photographers spring to mind.

Photo culling, i.e., the selection of images and the removal of unwanted images, is typically a time-consuming and unenjoyable process. However, if you have thousands of images to go through, it’s a necessary evil – you need to find your best images, after all.

Thanks to AI-powered software tools such as Narrative Select, the image culling process can be made 10x faster and more enjoyable. Select allows photographers to important thousands of RAWs in seconds, then harnesses AI to identify if subjects are in focus and whether they have their eyes open.

You’re able to quickly identify the ‘worst’ images from your photoshoot and hide them, meaning you’re sorting through far fewer images per shoot.

Once you’ve culled your images, you can import them into Lightroom CC for some more artificial intelligence enhanced tweaking.

AI Photo Editing Software

With the wealth of photo editing software available to us here in 2023, it was only a matter of time before we could take advantage of AI to retouch our images.

Image editing has always been a rather tedious and time-consuming process, but thanks to AI-powered image editors by the likes of Skylum, Topaz and Adobe, the path to stunning photos is a whole lot simpler… and dare I say it, more fun too.

Skylum’s Luminar Neo offers artificial intelligence-powered image editing tools such as sky replacement and portrait enhancement, saving hours of editing with one-click special effects.

Topaz Gigapixel takes advantage of the latest AI technology to do the previously impossible – enlarge an image without visual degradation, meaning you can print out your old 6-megapixel smartphone images on A3 paper without pixelation.

Adobe has been using their AI engine Sensei for several years now, but more recently, we’ve seen artificial intelligence trickle into Lightroom’s Selection tools, using AI to identify specific subjects or points of interest in a photo to create a complex mask in a couple of clicks.

In Photoshop, Neural Filters is a breakthrough in AI-powered creativity and image manipulation – if you’ve ever wanted to edit a frown into a smile, or adjust the age of your portrait subject, you can now do that in seconds, not hours.

…and if you’ve ever wanted to let the robots do all your photo editing, ImagenAI can handle that for you too.

Final Words

You’ll always find some naysayers complaining about the use of AI in photography, saying it’s the end of ‘real photography’.

I understand their perspective, but it’s also important to consider how photo manipulation has been around well before the digital age – photographers have been dodging and burning images in film photography for decades.

Sure, it may not be quite as impressive as replacing a sky with one click or using computers to select the best photos you’ve taken, but it’s all still evolution in photography.

Taking photos is, after all, just creative expression. What tools and technology you use to achieve your result should be irrelevant. If you’re comfortable with the final result, isn’t that all that matters?

What do you think? Is artificial intelligence ‘ruining’ photography? Or are you already taking advantage of AI photography? Let us know in the comments.

The post Artificial Intelligence in Photography in 2023 appeared first on Swiss Photo Club Blog.

In this short article, I will quickly summarize these new features in Lightroom as I try them on my photos and provide you with my honest opinion.

Make sure to update your Lightroom and Photoshop to the latest version using your Creative Cloud App to see all these new features.

We have of course updated the curriculum of both Lightroom Classic course and Photoshop course with these new features. You can also check our practice sessions if you only want to go through these newest features. Learn from our experienced instructors and get immediate feedback from them as you work on your photos.

If you don’t have Lightroom yet, you can purchase it together with Photoshop (select Photography package) from the Swiss Adobe store.

Content-aware remove

With this new tool, you can remove unwanted objects or people from your photo by using the artificial intelligence to replace the gap.

This is the Lightroom version of Content aware fill in Photoshop, that should do the job in easier cases.

As you can see in the recording, it does a very decent job when the object is isolated with room to copy. However it starts to struggle when there is less sample area, in which case you can try to manually change the sampled area (Press Cmd or Ctrl + drag an area on the image while a Content-Aware Remove spot is selected). In more difficult cases, you will still need Photoshop.

Automatically select people & backgrounds

With this new feature, Lightroom can automatically detect people and objects in your photo, select them or the background and allow you to make changes. The new Select People mask lets you edit specific parts of the body like skin, eyes, lips, teeth, and more. Here’s how I edited a portrait I took some time ago:

I’m very impressed with this feature, it will definitely reduce the need to use Photoshop for many of my photos.

Automatically select objects:

This lets you make precise local adjustments to one or more objects in a photo.

Do one of the following to make a selection:

• Brush Select: Roughly brush over the object you want to select.
• Rectangle Select: Make a box over the object you want to select.

I found that using the rectangle to select an object works better than the brush:

I hope you enjoy these new features as much as I do. If you would like to learn more about Lightroom, join one of our upcoming classes.

Lightroom Course by Swiss Photo Club:

Format & Price:

Learn this incredible software in a single 7-hour class, usually Saturday or Sunday. Price: CHF 390.-

See the upcoming dates in Western or Eastern Switzerland. I have also added a 2h practice workshop (in person in Geneva or on zoom) for those who simply want to practice these new features.

Course Content:

• Recommended file / folder structure to save your photos
• Using external drives: When to use, which models we recommend
• Recommended backup strategy to never lose your files
• How the Catalogue system works in Lightroom
• Lightroom Classic vs Lightroom vs Photoshop: When to use which software
• How to Import your photos and save to correct folders
• How to select your favorites using flags and ratings
• Applying keywords, using filters
• How to best use collections
• Develop Module: How to improve your photos with Global and Local adjustments
• Using Lightroom together with Photoshop
• Final effects (color grading, vignette, etc)
• Exporting photos with the correct settings

The post Lightroom Classic 12.0 New Features (October 2022): Content-Aware Remove & Automatic Selection appeared first on Swiss Photo Club Blog.

Make sure to update your Lightroom and Photoshop to the latest version using your Creative Cloud App to see all these new features.

We have of course updated the curriculum of both Lightroom Classic course and Photoshop course with these new features. I have also added a practice workshop (join in person or by zoom) to go through these features if you already know Lightroom. Check them out if you would like to learn from our experienced instructors and get immediate feedback from them as you work on your photos.

If you don’t have Lightroom yet, you can purchase it together with Photoshop (select Photography package) from the Swiss Adobe store.

Color Grading (Oct 2020, v10)

This new panel replaced the “split toning” panel with much more powerful “color wheels”.

Color grading is used to create specific moods in your photos. It requires an understanding of the color wheel and the rules of color harmony.

You can add blue hues to make a picture appear cold, or try yellow and orange to make it look warm. Remember the North scenes in Game of Thrones that looked all blue? Or a happy / sweet scene tinted pink? It’s done on purpose to take advantage of the psychological effects that colors create. On this page, you can see how some famous movies used color grading.

We cover color theory and how to use it in photography in our intermediate evening course.

How to use:

1. Decide on the mood you want to create
2. Select shadows / midtones or highlights to start with
3. Use the corresponding color wheel to apply the color of your choice
4. Do the same for mid tones and highlights
5. Adjust blending and balance sliders to refine how these colors apply

Here’s an example from a previous Istanbul trip where I used complementary colors to improve contrast:

Super Resolution (v10.3 – June 2021)

This is pure voodoo magic! Lightroom can now improve the resolution of your photos by 4 times without any visible giveaways. It’s perfect if you had to crop your photo aggressively and still want to print it in a big size. The final result is quite similar to the original.

It’s super simple to use: Development module, right click, Enhance. Here’s an example:

Automatic subject / sky selection (v11 – Oct 2021)

This impressive new feature was recently imported from Photoshop: Click a button and Lightroom selects your subject. Click another button and the sky is selected. If there’s anything to subtract or add to your selection, you can use the previous selection tools. Then you can immediately start applying adjustments to your image.

Here’s an example of subject selection on a photo taken at one of my Portrait Photography courses :

In the second image, I used the subject selection two times: first to increase the exposure and contrast on the subject, and then I inverted the subject selection to darken the background and add a bit of blue using white balance.

Here is an example of sky selection on a photo taken from a hot air balloon on our Cappadocia trip:

Before / After:

Enhanced Masking (v11 – Oct 2021)

Access all the local adjustments (including automatic subject or sky selections) from a single button:

Don’t get confused by the word “masking” (taken from Photoshop). It simply means applying your adjustments to a specific part of your photo. You can define that area using the following options:

• Automatic subject or sky selection
• Brush, radial & linear gradient : Same as previous version
• Color Range : Apply changes to a specific color
• Luminance Range : Apply changes to a specific luminance
• Depth Range : Only if your photo includes depth data, which is currently only possible with the recent iPhone’s portrait mode.

The best part of these new features is that you can stack different methods of selection. E.g., start with automatic subject, then add more with a brush.

Here’s an example from a previous Zermatt Photography Trip:

First I used automatic sky selection, which selected the Matterhorn as part of the sky. Then I used the brush tool to exclude the Matterhorn and applied exposure, white balance and saturation adjustments.

I hope you enjoy these new features as much as I do. If you would like to learn more about Lightroom, join one of our upcoming classes.

Lightroom Course by Swiss Photo Club:

Format & Price:

Learn this incredible software in a single 7-hour class, usually Saturday or Sunday. Price: CHF 390.-

See the upcoming dates in Western or Eastern Switzerland. I have also added a 2h practice workshop (in person in Geneva or on zoom) for those who simply want to practice these new features.

Course Content:

• Recommended file / folder structure to save your photos
• Using external drives: When to use, which models we recommend
• Recommended backup strategy to never lose your files
• How the Catalogue system works in Lightroom
• Lightroom Classic vs Lightroom vs Photoshop: When to use which software
• How to Import your photos and save to correct folders
• How to select your favorites using flags and ratings
• Applying keywords, using filters
• How to best use collections
• Develop Module: How to improve your photos with Global and Local adjustments
• Using Lightroom together with Photoshop
• Final effects (color grading, vignette, etc)
• Exporting photos with the correct settings

The post Lightroom Classic: New Features (2021). Color grading, super resolution, auto selection appeared first on Swiss Photo Club Blog.