Iron Clothes in Photoshop in 30 Seconds

Almost every conversation I see about AI and photography is about generating things that were never in the frame in the first place, and that's never been the part that interests me. What I actually care about is getting time back. The small distractions that were out of my control on the day, the ones that used to cost me twenty minutes with the healing brush, can now be sorted cleanly in seconds with the texture still intact.

Wrinkled clothing and folded backdrops are the two that come up again and again. So here's how I deal with both.

The orange t shirt

First job on this one was a distracting logo on the shirt, and for that I go straight to the Remove Tool. The setting worth knowing about is Auto, which lets Photoshop work out for itself whether it needs standard content aware fill or whether it needs to reach for generative AI. On a simple cleanup like a small logo it'll usually just handle it locally, which means you're not burning generative processing on something that didn't need it.

With the logo gone, the creases were the bigger problem, and that's a three step job.

Make a loose selection around the whole shirt with the standard Lasso Tool. Nothing precious about it, loose is fine. Then open Generative Fill from the contextual taskbar and pick the Firefly Image 5 model, which in my experience is much better at editing what's already there and preserving fine detail than it is at inventing things you didn't ask for. Then type a clear prompt: "remove the creases from off the orange t shirt".

That's it.

What comes back has the harsh creases gone but the natural drape still there, along with the shadows and the weave of the fabric. It still looks like a t shirt someone was actually wearing, which is the whole point.

That slightly crispy edge, and the Quick Mask fix

The second example was a branded white t shirt, and that's a bit more involved because you want a proper selection rather than a loose lasso.

The Object Selection Tool is quick here, and using Select People and then Upper Clothes gets you there in a couple of clicks. The catch is that it can leave a hard, slightly crispy edge, and you tend to notice it most around the neckline where the shirt meets skin.

In Adobe Camera Raw and in Lightroom there are dedicated Feather and Edge sliders for AI masks, which sort this out instantly. Photoshop doesn't have those in the main workspace at the moment, so you need a workaround, and the one I use is Quick Mask.

Make your selection with the Object Selection Tool, then tap Q to drop into Quick Mask Mode. Go to Filter, then Blur, then Gaussian Blur, and put in something small; I'm usually somewhere between 1 and 1.2 pixels. Tap Q again to come out.

That tiny bit of blur softens the boundary between the mask and the skin so the transition reads as natural rather than cut out.

Being specific is the whole game

This is the bit I'd underline if I were underlining anything.

Generative Fill still needs a clear instruction even when you've made a precise selection. If you type "remove the creases" and nothing else, more often than not you'll get nothing back at all, because the model hasn't been given enough to go on.

Prompt it with "remove the creases from off the white t shirt" instead and it knows exactly what it's looking at and what you want doing. The folds go, the printed typography stays where it was, and the grain of the fabric survives.

It feels fussy the first couple of times. It stops feeling fussy the moment you see the difference.

The same thing works on backdrops

Studio backgrounds are the other one, and the workflow is identical.

Select your subject with Select and then Subject, then invert it with Select and then Inverse so it's the background you're working on rather than the person. Soften that boundary with the same Quick Mask and Gaussian Blur trick, which matters more here than anywhere else because of hair and shoulders.

Then in Generative Fill, be even more specific than you think you need to be. Something like: "remove the creases from off the grey background. do not change the look of the grey background. keep the texture etc."

Those extra instructions are doing real work. Without them you can end up with a background that's been quietly smoothed into a flat, artificial gradient, and you've lost the character of the thing entirely. With them, the fold lines from a portable backdrop like the Westcott Vintage Grey X-Drop Pro disappear and the texture stays exactly as it was.

None of this is compulsory

I'm not telling anyone they have to work this way. If you enjoy retouching every fold by hand, and plenty of people genuinely do, there's nothing wrong with that at all and the results will be lovely.

But if you'd rather spend less of your life sat in front of an editing screen and more of it on the actual photography, using these tools deliberately, on the boring problems rather than to invent things that were never there, is a big win.

Early Morning Swimmers, a Man Called Neptune and Matching the Shadows

I was down on the beach at Lyme Regis at 7 yesterday morning for the next set of portraits for my “I am Lyme” project, this time with early morning sea swimmers, Mary and Christine; Mary runs the Axminster and Lyme Regis Cancer Support, and Christine, an artist and also the wife of Harry May, one of the fishermen I photographed a good few weeks back.

Waiting for them to come out

Low tide had been at around half four, and we were shooting at seven, so the sea was on its way back in but still a fair way out, so I waited until they'd had their swim and photographed the two of them together right on the water's edge, wet hair and robes.

Christine and Mary

My dear friend Steve Healy came along to help out and did a top job holding the light, which meant I could spend the time talking to Mary and Christine rather than fiddling about with a stand.

And then Neptune turned up

This is the part I couldn't have planned.

While we were shooting, Mary and Christine spotted a chap they knew coming out of the sea and pointed him out to me; Nick, known affectionately as Neptune, another early morning sea swimmer that has done so pretty much his entire life of 83 years; yeah I know what you’re thinking “He’s 83??” Yep, looks amazing huh. I guess there’s something in this sea swimming.

Nick aka Neptune

Anyway, they called him over and he was keen from the off, which always helps. For him though it had to be in the water, because anywhere else would have been wrong, so it was trainers off, trousers rolled up and in I went. Mary took over the light for that one, stood in the sea alongside me, and it was done in a handful of frames.

What I used

• the Westcott FJ800 strobe

• the Westcott Rapid Box, 3ft by 4ft softbox

• the Fujifilm X-T5 with the 33mm f/1.4 WR lens

• the Westcott XT1-M wireless trigger

That's the lot, and you'll notice there's no neutral density filter on that list.

The settings, and why there's no ND filter

Normally on the seafront I'd have one on to keep the shutter speed within sync while I'm shooting wide open, and to hold on to the detail in the sky. This morning was properly overcast though, so the sky was doing nothing dramatic and there was nothing to rescue. The grey did the job for me.

My Fujifilm X-T5 was in Manual with the following settings used to “set the scene” …

1/160 sec, f/4, ISO 100, with the 33mm giving me roughly the 50mm equivalent on the X-T5.

For the flash, the FJ800 went into TTL first, purely to get the exposure right on the skin, and once it was there I locked it in using the TTL to manual function, which I keep banging on about. From that point on it fires exactly the same every single frame, so nothing shifts as I move around or recompose. It takes seconds to do, and on a morning when your subjects have just got out of the sea, seconds matter.

Matching the shadows, which is the bit most people miss

The softbox was in as close as I could physically get it, just out of frame, and that was a deliberate decision rather than habit.

When you're using flash outdoors, most of the attention goes on balancing the flash with the ambient, so the two brightnesses sit together and it doesn't look lit. That's only half of it. You also have to match the quality of the light, meaning the shadows your flash makes need to look like the shadows already in the scene, whether those are hard or soft.

Yesterday morning was flat and overcast, so the light on everything around us was very soft, with shadows that were barely there. If I'd lit Mary and Christine with something small, or with a big modifier pulled back a long way, I'd have put a harder shadow on their faces than anything else in the frame had. The eye picks that up straight away, even when the person looking can't tell you what's wrong with it. It's one of the biggest giveaways that a flash was used.

So a 3ft by 4ft box, in tight, giving light almost as soft as the morning itself. On a hard, bright day I'd want the opposite, something that puts a shadow on the face with an edge to it, because that's what the sun is doing to everything else.

It's worth paying as much attention to that as you do to which modifier you own. Same softbox, wrong distance, and the picture tells on you.

BIG Thanks to Steve for holding the light all morning, to Mary for taking over when I waded in, and to Christine and Nick for being so game about the whole thing.

Latest Wex Roadshow Locations and Something That Stuck With Me

The last few days took me out on the road for the next two dates of the Wex Photo Video Roadshow, first at Milton Keynes and then up to Nottingham. Two very different days, and both of them a lot of fun.

Milton Keynes was the testing one. It's a relatively small store, so there was no space indoors to set up for my bit showing how I take portraits with minimal kit in a small space, which meant being out the front of the store, under a gazebo, in 34 degrees.

Working under a gazebo in the sun

It was hot, and on top of that we had the sun shifting round through the day and bright light coming in under the edge of the gazebo.

So the light was never quite the same for very long.

I had good company out there though, with my friend Carly from BenQ UK and my friend Dominic from Epson both under the gazebo with me.

Carly from BenQ UK

I actually really enjoyed it; it kept me on my toes and it kept making me adapt, and more than that, it showed something I think is worth showing; whatever the environment, you can still make a good portrait … you just work with what you've got in front of you.

It was good to be able to talk people through the technical side of that, but also the other half of it, which is how I zone in on somebody so that all their focus is on me; voice, mannerisms, the way I talk to someone while I’m working. That's what helps them relax.

The people who sat in front of the camera

I wasn't photographing models over the two days, II was photographing whoever had come along and wanted to know more about what I do, which for me, is always the better way to do it.

My friend Mick Hampson came along at Milton Keynes and I got a portrait of him that he’s really happy with. There was also a lady called Deborah, a photographer herself, who hates having her picture taken, but she's seen her portrait since getting home and she's really pleased with it, which is just wonderful to hear.

Mick with one of the other portraits I took of him

Then after Milton Keynes I had a lovely dinner with good friends Mick and Ian Munro before setting off up the road to Nottingham.

Nottingham, and the luxury of air conditioning

Nottingham is a much bigger store, so this time I was actually inside, with air conditioning, which after the day before, that felt like a proper treat.

Great day again, and lots of pictures taken, including one of a member of staff called Sam.

I distinctly remember a lovely guy by the name of Kevin, who came along and told me straight out that he doesn't think he's very photogenic.

We got a black and white portrait of him looking away from the camera, a bit moodier, a bit more contemplative, which he's now seen and he's really happy with.

He said in an email reply that it's encouraged him to want to get back into taking portraits himself.

That sort of thing is why I do these days.

The bit that stayed with me

There was a chap at Nottingham who'd clearly been doing photography a long time. We got talking, and I invited him to take a seat so I could photograph him. His wife sat down instead, which was lovely.

While we were there, a friend of his came over and said to him, “oh, I'm surprised you're here, you already know how to do all this”, and he meant the setup, the lighting, all the technical side of it.

That stuck with me, because that's not what portrait photography is about.

Yes, it's important to have nice light on someone, light that complements them or creates the mood you're after, but the most important thing of all is the person in front of the camera.

Somewhere along the line, that chap's priorities had turned a hundred and eighty degrees, and the kit and the setup had ended up mattering more than the person sat in the chair.

It's the point I made over both days, and it's the one I'd want anyone to take away from this:

“If someone looks uncomfortable on camera, they will look uncomfortable in good light and in bad light. It makes no difference. So helping them become comfortable is the most important thing of all.”

Portrait, retouch, print, all in one go

The thing I enjoyed most over the two days was being able to show the whole process end to end, and that came down to teaming up with BenQ and Epson.

At Milton Keynes it worked like this…

I'd take a portrait, then bring everyone round the laptop, which was hooked up to the BenQ SW272U, the same monitor I use day to day at home. I'd talk through the edit as I was doing it, with people stood there watching it happen. Then I'd hand it over to Dominic, who printed it out on a matt fine art paper.

We did the same at Nottingham, although Carly wasn't there for that one, so I was editing on my MacBook Pro screen and then passing the files to Dominic to print.

Somebody could sit for a portrait, watch it being retouched, and then hold a print of themselves in their hands, all within a few minutes. People really loved seeing that hands-on, and clearly something people want more of.

The kit

Nothing complicated, and all of it small enough to go in the car for two locations:

• Fujifilm X-T5 and GFX 100S II

• Westcott FJ100 strobe

• Westcott Rapid Box Switch, the medium Octa

• Westcott X-Drop Pro background

That's the lot, and portability was the whole point of it.

The new FJ100 Storebe from Westcott perfromed flawlessly … and didn’t need a signle charge. In fact I doubt I’ll be charging it for the remaining tour dates.

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where I'm off to next

Both teams at Milton Keynes and Nottingham were incredibly engaging and so welcoming, and there was a real buzz about both days, so a HUGE thank you to them.

Norwich is next, later this week; quite a drive for me but I’m really looking forward to it, so if you’re in the area … I’ll see you there ( LINK )

I am Lyme - Group Portrait on Victoria Pier

If you're ever in Lyme Regis and you happen to be on the Cobb at 7.35 in the morning, you'll meet these gentlemen. Seven days a week, come rain or shine, they're there.

Each of them is very well known in Lyme. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard people talk about this group, how good they are for one another and how good they are for the town. More than once someone has said to me that if you ever needed help, these would be the first men stepping forward.

If you walk past them, all you'll hear is laughter. That morning walk is their own little bit of therapy, their own bit of escape, their own way of putting the world to rights. Whenever they stop and speak to somebody it's as if they've known them for years, and you always come away feeling better for it.

I'd wanted to photograph these men as a group for a good while to include in my "I am Lyme" project, because to me they really do represent Lyme Regis.

I was out with my great friend on Saturday morning and we happened to be on the Cobb, and sure enough, there they were. I stopped and explained about the project and they were more than keen, making jokes amongst themselves about getting their hair done and sorting out the makeup.

The following morning I went back, without telling them I'd be there.

I'd arranged to photograph Jason first ( LINK ) , so once that was done I carried my kit down to the far end of the Cobb, right by Victoria Pier. If you ever visit and go out on a sea fishing trip, that's the bit where you get on the boat.

The kit was simple. Flash on a stand with my 3ft by 4ft softbox, and I had the softbox positioned horizontally because I knew I wanted to spread the light right across the group rather than have it drop off at either end. My back was to the sun, and so was the back of the softbox. Then I sat down next to it all and waited.

At 7.35, they turned up.

I walked over to one of the guys, John, who happens to be the brother of Harry May, who I photographed a few weeks back for the project. I said, "John, I said I'd be here. How do you fancy doing the group portrait now?"

Two test shots, four frames, done. It took a couple of minutes at most, because the last thing I wanted was to hold up their walk.

As we were shooting, the wind picked up a bit and the stand needed some support, so I grabbed a volunteer from the group of people waiting to go out on a fishing trip. I never got his name, but he did a sterling job of holding everything steady.

I packed up and was about to head off to Town Mill for some breakfast, and I turned back to the guys and said, "Have a great day, and I'll see you soon with a print" , and each of them called out "Thank you Glyn" ,"Cheerio Glyn" , "See you soon Glyn"

I'd said my name once and each of them remembered it. I walked away with a beaming smile on my face.

This coming Tuesday I'm heading down to The Cobb nice and early to sit at the end of the Cobb by Victoria Pier with a coffee, and just wait for these great guys to turn up so I can hand them each their own print.

I cannot wait.

Camera Raw 18.5: New Blemish Removal + What Adobe Got Wrong

Camera Raw 18.5 landed on the 4th August, and alongside the usual long list of small tweaks there are three additions worth knowing about. Two of them are quick admin jobs. The third is a brand new portrait tool that genuinely changes how retouching works inside Camera Raw.

One thing to get out of the way first. All three are Camera Raw only at the moment. They aren't in Lightroom Desktop or Lightroom Classic yet. Camera Raw is the processing engine sitting underneath the whole Lightroom family, so new features tend to turn up there first and then work their way across to everything else. If you've got Photoshop, you can start using all of this today through the Camera Raw Filter, on raw files, JPEGs, TIFFs, or an individual layer.

Turning the generative AI features off

If you enter competitions, or you deliver to clients who want to know nothing generative has been near their files, or you'd simply rather not have those tools sitting there in front of you, you can now switch them off completely.

Open Preferences, the settings icon, go to the Generative AI tab and uncheck Enable Generative AI Features. That's it.

What it turns off is the three tools that make brand new pixels out of thin air. What it leaves alone is Denoise, Super Resolution and the standard Remove tool, because none of those are generative.

One thing to watch. The setting is per machine, so if you work on a desktop and a laptop you'll need to turn it off on both.

Two small additions to the vectorscope

If you use the vectorscope for colour work, and you'll find it by right clicking the histogram and choosing Show Vectorscope, there are two new options in there.

You can now line Red up at 3 o'clock, which matches the layout video editors have been using for years. And you can toggle on LAB values so you're reading actual numbers rather than eyeballing it, which is handy when you're matching skin tones across a whole shoot rather than one frame.

Small stuff, but if you're already living in the vectorscope you'll appreciate both.

The new Blemish Removal

This is the headline addition, and it lives inside the Remove panel under a new section called Distraction Removal, then Blemishes.

Click Apply and it runs an automatic first pass across the face. That one click gets you a decent way there, but only a decent way. The bit that actually matters is understanding what the two sliders underneath are doing, because they're doing two very different jobs.

Amount, for the temporary stuff

The Amount slider deals with temporary marks. Spots, breakouts, the things that would have cleared up on their own in a fortnight anyway.

At 100 it removes every temporary mark it can find. As you bring it down, the smaller and subtler marks come back first while the more prominent ones stay hidden. Sitting somewhere in the middle is usually where you want to be, because it clears the angry breakout without stripping the skin of its normal texture and leaving you with that plastic look nobody wants.

Fade, and the default I'd change every time

The Fade slider handles permanent features. Moles, beauty spots, freckles. The things that are part of someone's face rather than something that turned up last Tuesday.

Adobe has set the default for Fade at 50.

I've got a real problem with that. At 50, Camera Raw is fading a client's natural moles and beauty spots halfway out before you've touched a single control. Nobody asked it to. You open the file, and a piece of software has quietly made a decision about somebody's face on your behalf.

So the habit I'd get into is this. Every time you open a portrait, drag Fade down to 0 before you do anything else. Look at the face as it actually is, then decide. If the client has asked you to soften a mole, fine, soften it. But make that an intentional choice you've made, not a default you didn't notice.

Refine, for the bits it gets wrong

Clicking Refine gives you a brush with two modes.

Restore brings back something the tool has taken out that you wanted to keep, a character mark or a scar it's decided to tidy away. Remove clears anything the automatic pass has missed.

Between those two you can get any face exactly where you want it in under a minute.

If you're working on a group shot you can pick individual faces, or select All People and do the lot in one go. I'd be careful with All People, though. The same Amount and Fade settings applied to a teenager and a grandparent rarely work for both, and you'll usually be better off going face by face.

Texture is only half the job

Here's the bit that gets missed, and it's the difference between a retouch that looks finished and one that doesn't quite.

There are two separate problems on a spot. There's texture, which is the raised physical bump on the skin, and there's tone, which is the red patch sitting underneath and around it.

The Blemishes tool is excellent on texture. It does nothing at all about tone.

Think of it like makeup. The Blemishes tool is the concealer, covering the bump. You still need a base to even out the colour underneath. Skip that step and you're left with red blotches on otherwise clean skin, and those often pull the eye harder than the original breakout did, because now there's nothing else there to explain them.

Fixing the tone with Point Color

The temptation is to build a skin selection and shift the colour globally, but that moves the whole face just to fix a few patches. A localised brush is much better behaved.

1. grab a standard masking brush with a soft, feathered edge and paint over only the red, blotchy areas

2. inside the brush mask settings, open Point Color

3. take the eyedropper and click on an area of clean, healthy skin nearby, which tells Camera Raw what colour that red patch is supposed to be

4. widen the Variance slider

That last one is where it happens. Expanding Variance pulls the surrounding red tones smoothly towards your clean sample, so the patchwork evens out without anything else on the face moving.

So, next time you open a portrait

Run Blemishes, pull Fade to 0 and decide for yourself what stays, then set Amount somewhere sensible rather than pinning it at 100.

Then brush the red areas and use Point Color to bring the tone back in line.

The whole thing takes a couple of minutes inside one dialogue box. No healing layers, no frequency separation, no round trip into Photoshop and back. For anyone who's put off retouching because it always felt like a job that needed a stack of layers and half an hour, this is a lovely way in.

Photographing "Beach House Café Jason" for I am Lyme

I was up and out at 4.30 last Sunday morning to take an early morning sunrise photograph of a chap called Jason down on the seafront for my "I Am Lyme" project.

Jason is a well known face around Lyme Regis. Everyone knows him and everyone comments about him being such a kind, gentle soul. We chose The Beach House Cafe right on the front as the place to photograph him as he’s great friends of the owners.

I've seen him loads of times, always a “Good morning”, and the odd bit of chat, nothing much more than that, but I've wanted to photograph him for a good while.

Turns out somebody else I'm shooting for the project soon had already mentioned it to him. So on the Saturday, when I was out with my friend Steve Healy and we happened to see him, we got chatting about the project and I asked him there and then. He was more than happy to be involved, and it was Jason who suggested six o'clock the following morning. So that's what we did.

Sitting down before picking the camera up

I got down there good and early and was set up by 5.30am, and before I even picked the camera up we sat and chatted, talking about all sorts.

That's when he told me he isn't originally from Lyme Regis; he's from Southampton, and a few years ago he was cycling round the world, all over India and Thailand, and he was making his way round the UK when he stopped off here and never left. He got the job at the cafe pretty much the next day and has run it ever since for the elderly couple who own it.

At one point in the conversation he also opened up about some fairly serious medical problems he's had to deal with in the not too distant past. It's not my story to tell so I'll leave it there, but it really struck me … you just never know what somebody has been through.

Taking the portraits

Once he'd finished setting up, that's when we started taking some portrait shots; all very slow paced with no rush at all, which was lovely.

It was genuinely a completely relaxing experience and that's exactly what I'm loving about the "I Am Lyme" project, much the same as I did with the veterans work. By sitting and chatting with people you get to know them a bit, you understand them a bit more, and I genuinely believe that comes through when you take their portrait.

The thing that really got me though was how many people said good morning to him while we were stood there. I honestly lost count. Everybody knows Jason.

The kit I used

Nothing complicated, and nothing I haven't used a hundred times before:

• Fujifilm X-T5

• Fujifilm XF 33mm f/1.4 R LM WR

• Westcott FJ800

• Westcott Rapid Box Switch Octa, 3ft x 4ft

• Westcott XT-1M remote trigger

• Tethered into Capture One Mobile on the iPad

Settings were ISO 100, f/4.0 and 1/125 sec.

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TTL to manual, and why I keep banging on about it

The flash side of it is the bit worth explaining, because it's the thing that makes a shoot like this so much calmer than it sounds.

It works like this.

I set the flash to TTL and take a frame, and the flash works out for itself what it reckons is the perfect exposure. All I have to do then is nudge it up or down on the dial on the remote until it's where I want it, and use the TTL to Manual function to lock that power in.

That's it. Pretty much one shot and the flash exposure is bang on and we're good to go.

From then on the flash fires at exactly the same power every single frame, so nothing is quietly drifting about while I'm working, and that's really the whole point of it for me. It keeps the technical side of the photography simple and quick, so as a portrait photographer my time gets spent engaging with the person in front of my camera instead of being distracted by the tech.

For anyone who's been put off by the idea of manual flash, it's a lovely way in as well, because you're letting the flash do the maths and then simply keeping the answer.

The ambient was the interesting part that morning.

The rising sun was over to camera right and it kept appearing and then going back behind the clouds, so the light was changing every couple of minutes. Rather than chase it, I set my camera for the ambient with the sun behind cloud and then only took photographs when it was behind cloud. Wait, shoot, wait again.

It sounds like a faff but it isn't. It meant the ambient light was consistent, and because the flash power was locked in manual, that was consistent too. Same background, same light on his face, frame after frame.

The print

I'll be getting Jason's print to him in the next few days, which is the bit of this project I look forward to most. Handing somebody a print of themselves in person is a very different thing to sending them a file, and it's become the part of "I Am Lyme" that I wouldn't skip for anything.

I’ll make sure to grab a picture of Jason with his print and share it.

Lightroom 9.5 - Why Render to DNG Changes Everything

Lightroom 9.5 has landed, and alongside the usual list of bug fixes, new camera and lens profiles and a few Windows performance tweaks, there are three additions that actually change how you work day to day.

One thing to get out of the way first. This update is for Lightroom Desktop. Classic had its own round of updates at the same time, but a couple of these features haven't made their way over to Classic yet, so if you're a Classic user, don't go looking for all of them.

Feather and Edge, for masks that don't bleed

The masking panel now has two new sliders, Feather and Edge.

If you use Camera Raw, or you've been running the pre-release builds, these will look familiar. They're just available to everyone now.

Worth being clear about what they do and what they don't. They don't make Lightroom any better at finding your subject. If Select Subject misses completely, these two sliders aren't going to rescue it. What they do is let you clean up the last few pixels along the edge of a selection, which is usually where the trouble is.

Turn on the mask overlay so you can actually see the boundary, then work the two sliders until the mask pulls tight against the edge. That's it. No more adjustments spilling over onto things you didn't want to touch.

On portraits it's the eyes, the lips and the skin masks, where a brightening adjustment has a habit of creeping onto the eyelid or the surrounding skin. On landscapes and architecture it's horizons, tree branches against a bright sky, and the edges of buildings, all the places a halo turns up if you're not careful.

Render to DNG, and why it's the interesting one

Right click any photo now and there's a new option in the menu: Render to DNG.

What it does is create a brand new file with all your current edits baked into the pixels, and it sits right alongside your original in the catalogue.

If you're a Photoshop person, think of it as a stamp visible layer. You get a flattened version to work on top of, and your original raw file is still sitting underneath it completely untouched, with every setting still live.

It says DNG, but it isn't raw

This is the bit worth slowing down for. Despite the .dng on the end, a rendered DNG is not a raw file. It's closer to a TIFF in a DNG wrapper.

Your original raw is the negative. It's holding all the hidden highlight and shadow data you can't see on screen but can pull back when you need to. The rendered DNG is the print. It has baked in whatever the picture looked like at the moment you rendered it, and anything you hadn't already recovered has gone.

So the rule is simple enough. Do your recovery on the raw. Pulling back a blown sky, lifting shadows that have gone dead, any serious white balance shift, all of that happens on the original file before you render anything. Once you've rendered, that detail isn't coming back.

What the rendered file is good for is adjusting rather than recovering. Contrast, fine tuning tone, stacking a heavy look on top. Things that work with what's already there rather than digging for what isn't.

Stacking presets without losing your edit

Here's where it earns its keep.

You know the problem. You spend twenty minutes dialling in exposure, tone curve and split toning, you get it exactly where you want it, and then you try a full look preset and it wipes the lot. Every slider you'd carefully set gets overwritten.

The way round it now is to finish your base edit on the raw file, right click and Render to DNG, then apply the preset to the new rendered file instead.

Because your edits are baked into the pixels of that rendered file, there are no sliders left for the preset to overwrite. It sits on top of your work rather than replacing it.

Just keep half an eye on the highlights when you're stacking, because a rendered file has less headroom than the raw did, and it'll clip sooner than you expect.

Crop and Expand

The Crop panel has been renamed Crop and Expand, and you can now drag the crop boundary outwards past the edge of the original frame. Handy for anything you framed a bit too tight.

When you expand, you get two ways to fill the new space.

Generative Expand uses AI to invent new content, which is what you want for a complicated background. It costs one credit on standard accounts, and it's free if you're on CC Pro.

Content-Aware Expand samples pixels from elsewhere in your own photo. It costs nothing on any plan, because it isn't generative, and for plain or repeating backgrounds it does the job perfectly well. Try that one first and save your credits for when you genuinely need them.

There's a catch with Generative Expand, though, and it's worth knowing about. When you run it, Lightroom flattens your existing AI edits, so any AI masking or Generative Remove you'd done gets locked in and you lose the ability to go back and tweak it.

Same fix as before. Do your AI edits and base adjustments on the raw, render to DNG, then drag the crop out and run the expand on the rendered file. Your master raw stays fully intact with the masks still live, and you've got a separate expanded version to export.

Everything else in 9.5

Beyond those three, there's a decent list of fixes and new support:

• masking sliders that wouldn't reset properly

• launch crashes caused by permission errors

• star rating glitches

• GPS data not pasting in local view

• smoother grid scrolling and faster window resizing on Windows

• new camera support for the GoPro Mission 1, GoPro Mission Pro and preliminary support for the Sony RX10 V

• new lens profiles including the Canon RF 7-14mm Fisheye, DJI Mavic 4 Pro, Sigma 85mm f/1.2 and a handful of macro lenses

So, next time you're editing

If a subject mask is bleeding onto something it shouldn't, reach for Feather and Edge.

If you want to try a preset over an edit you've already spent time on, render to DNG first.

And if you need a bit more room around a tight portrait, render to DNG, open Crop and Expand, and try Content-Aware before you spend a credit.

Render to DNG is the one I'd point at if you only look at one thing here. It's a small menu item that's easy to scroll past, and it quietly solves a problem plenty of us have been working around for years.

The New Westcott FJ100 and How It Compares to the Profoto A2

Westcott have announced the FJ100 today, and there are actually two of them; there's a speedlite and there's an off camera strobe.

It's the strobe I want to talk about here, partly because it's the more interesting of the two, and partly because it lands right on top of a light a lot of people already have strong opinions about.

The headline is simple enough … hundred watt seconds, a colour touchscreen, a removable battery that charges over USB-C, and a body small enough to disappear into a jacket pocket, and Westcott are selling it at £217 plus VAT.

A hundred watt seconds in something that size

The thing worth sitting with for a moment is that number; a hundred watt seconds is proper output. It's not a speedlite pretending, it's a strobe, and it's arriving in a housing that measures about 16 by 13 by 8 centimetres and weighs 700 grams with the battery in.

The whole design brief here was clearly footprint.

The spec sheet has the usual things you'd want and a few you might not expect at this size …

There's a modelling lamp. There's zoom control running from 24mm all the way out to 200mm. There's stroboscopic mode. HSS up to 1/8000th, TTL and manual, front and rear curtain, and a freeze mode that shortens the flash duration when you need it. It works as both a host and a client on the FJ wireless system, so it'll trigger your other lights or be triggered by them.

The battery is the bit that matters

700 full power flashes on one charge.

Of everything on the spec sheet, that's the one that changes how you actually work.

700 at full power means a wedding day, or an event, or a long portrait session, without the moment where you glance at the battery icon and start quietly doing sums about ISO.

It charges over USB-C, which means a power bank in your pocket, or a laptop, or the back of the car. You can run it off mains as well, so it does studio duty without eating charge cycles.

And it's the same battery family as the FJ80, so if you've already got a drawer of those, they carry straight over.

The touchscreen

The screen is crystal clear. The screens on the other FJ units are very clear anyway and easy to read even in bright sunlight, but this one is a noticeable step up.

That matters more than it sounds like it should. You're reading power values at arm's length, often in bright light, and usually in a hurry.

The Octa 15 and what goes on the front

Alongside the light there's a new Octa 15, a 15 inch softbox that clicks open in one motion and comes with the grid in the box. It's the same twist lock mount you already know from the FJ80, so existing Westcott twist lock modifiers go straight on.

For anything larger there's the S2 bracket, which is designed so the weight sits correctly through the stand rather than hanging off the light itself. That's what lets you put a proper sized box on the front of something this small, and it means my favourite 3' x 4' is still on the table.

The Creative Pack gels drop straight on the front.

How it compares to the Profoto A2

This is the comparison everybody's going to make, so let's make it properly. The A2 is Profoto's 100 watt second light, and it's £699.

Same wattage. Roughly three times the money.

A few of those deserve a sentence rather than a row.

The modelling lamp difference is the one worth pausing on. Profoto's runs at 3500 K, which is warm, and nowhere near their own flash at 5800 K. Westcott's is 5500 K, essentially daylight, and close enough to its own flash to be useful. One is for judging where your shadows fall, the other you could actually shoot with.

The zoom is the clearest gap. The A2 doesn't zoom at all.

The weight is the odd one. The Profoto is genuinely the smaller light being about the size of a drinks can and the Westcott about the size of a regular coffee mug, but with the battery in and the stand adapter on, which is how you'd actually use it, it comes out at 773 grams against the Westcott's 700. The smaller light is the heavier one.

But none of that is three times the money's worth of difference, and the battery gap runs the other way by a long distance.

Where I'll be with it

I'm looking forward to getting out and shooting with this one properly, and there's a video coming very soon showing it in action, so do keep an eye out for that.

I'll have it with me at all of the Wex Roadshows ( LINK ) I'm on as well. If you're coming to one, come and find me and have a play with it yourself. Pick it up, put it on a modifier, fire it at something. That's a far better way to work out whether a light suits you than any spec sheet is going to manage, mine included.

The travelling is the part I'm quietly pleased about. I've got flights over to Belfast and up to Glasgow coming up, and something this size just goes in the bag without a second thought. Anyone who's wrestled a full sized strobe through an airport will know exactly why that matters.

A hundred watt seconds, a touchscreen, USB-C charging and 700 full power flashes at £217 plus VAT.; on paper that's a lot of light for the money

Bristol, Breakfast and a Special Friend

Yesterday, Sunday 2nd August, I finally got to meet the wonderful Jean-François Léger in person, and it's one of those days I know I'll still be thinking about a long time from now.

We've been friends online for a while. It started in the comments on my YouTube channel, then he began joining in with the weekly lives I used to do, and when I set up the communities he came across to those as well.

Over the last year or so we've talked on live calls, back and forth in the community, and on one to one video chats, and somewhere in all of that we stopped being two people who recognised each other's names and became genuinely good friends.

He's also seriously talented. It was Jean-François who wrote and composed and sang “Picture This”, which was made as a gift for me for putting the communities together; it’s still one of the kindest things anyone has ever done for me.

A bit of a detour

He's been over from Canada for the past few weeks, in Avignon in France, performing on stage, but rather than head straight home afterwards he decided to take a detour across to the UK for a few days, which is how yesterday came about.

My friend Brian Lee arranged it all; a group of us at Mud Dock in Bristol for breakfast at 10am on the Sunday, everyone meeting up together, though the real reason we were all there was to see Jean-François, who's such a big part of the communities.

Meeting him was strange in the best possible way. It was almost as if we'd met before. All those awkward first time barriers you normally get with somebody just weren't there, and that's the special thing about the community, because by the time you meet in person you've already become good friends. Surreal, but wonderful.

Breakfast was fantastic. Lots of laughter, lots of chatting, and then a photo walk around Bristol afterwards, grabbing coffee, more chatting, just a really good social day with good people.

The kit I took

I did take a bit of kit along, because I wanted to make that extra bit of effort and photograph the fact that Jean-François was over here, properly on my main camera.

- the Westcott FJ800

- 3ft x 4ft softbox, which is my favourite

- Convertible umbrella

- Light stand

One light, one modifier, one stand. That's it.

The group shot, and why I went with the umbrella

After breakfast we did a group shot. There were quite a few of us, it all needed to happen quickly, and what I wanted was for the light to burst out of the FJ800 and cover everybody evenly. A softbox would have been too restrictive for that, so I went with the convertible umbrella instead, took the black cover off and fired the light straight through it. TTL, of course, as I always do. It worked beautifully and it took no time at all.

Portraits of Jean-François

Later on I wanted a few more pictures of Jean Francois on his own, and that's when the 3ft x 4ft softbox came out, and made use of the metal staircase leading up to Mud Dock.

I set the camera to manual first and dialled in the scene I wanted, mainly so I'd hold some detail in the sky rather than blowing it out. Then the flash goes on in TTL, with the Fuji set to face detection.

Because the camera is looking at the face, the TTL exposure gets worked out for the skin rather than for everything else in the frame, so it's exposing for the thing that actually matters in a portrait.

With a great exposure from the start, I then adjust it to taste and lock it in. Whatever power TTL just chose, I use TTL to Manual to copy the exact same power over into the Manual side of things, and every frame after that is consistent. That's it.

A few more by a tree after that, and then another group shot, because I couldn't resist.

What I'd hoped for, and what actually happened

I'd wanted much more time with him than one day.

The plan had been to get him down here to the south west, to meet Anne and to show him around Lyme Regis, and I'd even cancelled two of the Wex roadshow dates so I'd be home while he was over.

Then the work we're having done at the house landed on this exact week 🤷‍♂️

There's talk of him being back over later in the year, which would be brilliant, so hopefully we'll get that time yet.

Jean-François is still here in the UK as I write this. He stayed with a friend (Anthony Crothers) in South Wales on Sunday night, Brian picked him up again today, and he's with him now until Wednesday morning, when he heads off to the train station, over to France, and then home to Canada. A bit of a whirlwind, but so worth it.

Au revoir, mon ami!

WeX Manchester, Portraits and a Long Overdue Catch Up

Last week took me up to Manchester for the next leg of the Wex Summer Roadshow, and what a great couple of days it turned out to be.

I travelled up the day before so I could arrive fresh rather than rolling in as the shutters were going up, which is always the better way to do it when the store is a few hours away.

Good company for the journey too, but more on that shortly.

Manchester is a great store as well. There's a lot going on in there, plenty of space, and a real buzz about the place from the moment the doors opened.

The team at Wex Manchester

I have to give a mention to Guy, the store manager, who was just so incredibly welcoming from the off. The whole team were brilliant, friendly and dynamic and genuinely engaging with everybody who came through the door.

Photo by Ben Kapur

It's one of those things you notice when you visit a lot of different places. You can always see how the person leading a team influences the team itself, and Manchester is a really good example of that. Great atmosphere, great people.

Portraits on the shopfloor

As with the other roadshow dates, I spent the day on the shopfloor doing what I always do, which is classic portraits with minimal kit. Nothing that needs a studio or half a van to transport.

Here's what I took along this time:

• the Westcott X-Drop Pro background system

• my vintage grey backdrop

• the Westcott FJ400 II

• the Westcott X-T1M multi-brand remote trigger

• my Fuji

That vintage grey backdrop gets a lot of attention wherever I take it, and Manchester was no different. Loads of people came over to ask about it, which is always great to see, because it's such a big part of the look and yet it's the least technical thing in the bag.

What struck me at Manchester was how many people came over specifically to ask how I do the portraits. Not just what I use, but how it all fits together and why it looks the way it does. So we shot quite a few portraits across the day, and I'm really grateful to everyone who was kind enough to stand or sit in front of my camera for me.

I even edited a handful of them and emailed them across afterwards, which is always a nice way to round things off. There's something about handing somebody a finished portrait rather than just a snap on the back of a screen.

TTL to manual, and why I keep banging on about it

The thing that got the biggest reaction, as it has done at every stop, is the TTL to manual function on the X-T1M trigger.

It works like this. You take one shot in TTL and let the camera and flash sort the exposure out between them. With the Fuji, if you've got face detection and eye focus switched on, that's largely where it's metering from, so it's exposing for the skin, which is exactly what you want for a portrait. Have a quick look, make any small adjustment you fancy, then hold down the group A button on the trigger. It flips over into manual and remembers the power it was using in TTL.

That's it. One shot to get you there, and from that point on every frame is the same consistent exposure, shot after shot. No light meter, no guessing and chimping your way towards it.

For anyone who's been put off by the idea of manual flash, it's a lovely way in; you get the consistency of manual without having to do the maths first. It was great fun showing people how it worked and watching the penny drop.

Filming it all

I travelled up with Ben Kapur, who lives locally to me and is filming the majority of the roadshow dates and producing the content.

Ben's an incredible videographer. He shoots for some seriously high end clients, and the speed he turns work around at is something else. He's also a photographer, but it's the video work that really makes you sit up.

One evening he sat me down and showed me how he works in DaVinci Resolve, and I think that's now going to be my video editor of choice. The speed of it and the functionality on offer were enough to convince me on the spot.

An overdue catch up

The other highlight was getting to meet up with my great friend Dave Jagger, who I've known for a good number of years now through photography.

We got to spend some proper quality time together during the day and then headed out in the evening as well. It was very much overdue, and it was lovely to just sit and catch up properly rather than the usual quick hello at a trade show. Those days are worth the drive on their own.

Then it was the drive back home the following day, tired but with that good kind of tired you get after a day where everything just worked.

Where I'll be next

The roadshow rolls on, and here's where I'll be for the remaining dates:

• Milton Keynes, 14th August

• Nottingham, 15th August

• Norwich, 21st August

• Belfast, 3rd September

• Glasgow, 11th and 12th September

Photo by Ben Kapur

If you're anywhere near one of those, do come along and say hello. Entry is free, and you'll find me on the shopfloor throughout the day with the backdrop up and the light on, so there's no need to book anything or wait for a set time slot. Just wander over.

And if you fancy being in front of the camera, bring it on!

Here’s the ( LINK )

Hopefully see you there,
Glyn