The last time I visited Pontsticill, near Merthyr in South Wales, it was winter. There was snow on the mountains and the reservoir was full to capacity. Today couldn’t have been any more different, as there was none of that. However, it allowed for some great, and dramatic images.
I have decided to do something a bit different though. Over the years I’ve prided myself in getting it right in camera, with just a few tweaks to exposure, maybe some LUTs added and of course cropping and straightening. These images today were shot in raw and edited in the new DXO PhotoLab V5 Elite. There will be a review of this program coming soon, however, I have to say, the fact that I’ve reverted back to editing raw files after so many years, shows how much I like this program!
All images were shot using the Fujifilm X-T3 with XC50-230mm and TTArtisan 7.5mm lenses. I’ve decided to keep the fisheye images as they are, as I really like the way they have come out, and I do love fisheye lenses!
I colour graded using their Fujifilm Provia 400X colour profile, and as you can see, it worked well. During the initial super sunny period it looks beautiful, although the clouds came over by the end of the day. The clouds really were spectacular today at some points, and I have not exaggerated the clouds, this was as they were in camera.
As I said, there will be a review of DXO PhotoLab V5 Elite coming very soon, so please stay tuned for that! Your comments, likes and anything else is most welcome!
Thank you for taking the time to look at these.
Mark.
One Camera One Lens 
Very nice images! I especially like the one with clouds reflected in a puddle. Thanks for sharing them!
Off topic for this post, but I’d like to better understand what is meant by LUTs. I know LUT is an abbreviation for Look Up Table but not how that differs from Fuji Film simulations, Fuji in camera or X-Raw Studio Recipes, and post processing presets/recipes. So many ways to produce and manipulate the pixels. So little time and bandwidth to grok them.
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A LUT is a table of content for changing colours. It can change a blue into a red, or another colour. It can change its saturation and luminance for example. Mostly used to colour grade movies, it’s finding it’s way more and more into photography.
Fujifilm Simulations (recipes) are no more than tweaked, in camera jpeg colour profile changes. They have very limited scope form actual change, and once you start messing with the white balance shift, things get very messy! X-Raw studio is basically just using your camera to process, so the same as I’ve just mentioned.
LUTs allow for much more in-depth changes, and are usually much more accurate at matching colours from film etc as they use software to copy colours from old photos and match them exactly.
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Nice set Mark! Sorry to miss this one as it’s a great venue.
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Thank you John. Look forward to seeing you soon.
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beautiful pictures! i cannot understand the technical side of things but i can appreciate and admire the beautiful pictures, wishing you much success
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Thank you very much 🙏🙏🙏
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Bravo pour votre travail. J’adore !
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Merci 🙏🙏🙏
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