Astbury's Adventures in Photography

Modern photo processing software, including RAW conversion and the many filter type packages, can use a lot of computer resources . To make matters worse AI processing is increasingly being used for things like mask selection and this is demanding on processor capacity, often being pushed from the CPU onto a dedicated GPU. Usually the required computer specification for a given piece of software is provided in  minimum and recommended variants and performance can be decidedly poor at the minimum end of things. This can give rise to questions such as "is my machine good enough" and if not then "what should I upgrade to make it better". Example specs for DXO PhotoLab 9 The good news is there are tools to check performance that we can easily run to help see potential bottlenecks, taking some of the guesswork out of it. In a windows environment (Windows 11 or older editions) we can run Task Manager . To do this you can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + Esc, or r...

I have recently purchased DXO PhotoLab 9 , a RAW photo editing software package, and here I'll give an outline of why I changed over to this software and what my first impressions are after the first couple of weeks using it. DXO PhotoLab v9 So how did I get here? Well, like many, I had used Lightroom but when they moved over to subscription only I jumped ship, opting for a one-time license to save money. At that time I chose to go with Capture One Pro (COP), with a general aim to buy an upgrade maybe every other major release. Capture One worked well and I was happy with it but they then also changed their payment model, pushing subscriptions and making the one-off license a very limited and expensive alternative. So I have been treading water for a couple of years, just ticking over with my old version, but this of course means no support for newer camera models and no new functionality. COP supports the (very expensive) Phase One cameras and is also very good at tethering for th...

I have recently purchased DXO NIK Collection 6 , here I'll give an outline of why I wanted this software and what my history of using the product is, along with some of the pros and cons as I now see them. Back in 2012 my then photography tutor recommended I look at Silver Efex as it was considered one of the best tools for processing digital images for black and white. At that time NIK sold the tools separately or, for the price of a couple of the tools, you could buy the set as a bundle which is what I did. I got on well with the tools and made extensive use of both Silver Efex and later Color Efex. Around 2014 I swapped computers and was unable to activate the NIK licenses on the new machine, I found Google had taken over the software and via their support team I was able to get an installable version. Subsequently I could reinstall that version as I changed computers a couple of times but when I started using Capture One Pro I intended to manage without it. DXO took over the N...