This was interesting. I am sort of new to the Leica M8. I shot these in what I thought were monochrome settings with a yellow filter. Lightroom imported the images as color. I have to work on monochrome settings in the camera. Anyhoo, I converted all but one to BW. The image of the kite fliers had a line down the center of the sky with different shades of gray/black on either side so I did my best with limited editing skills to make it uniform. The color image I color graded to remove the yellow cast, leaving a filmic looking image. I should have gotten closer and shot that one in color to enjoy the beautiful colors from the Leica M8 sensor. I love the black and white renderings from the M8. Other editing programs import the black and white image directly. I probably have to apply a preset to preserve BW in Lightroom, but I may be losing the native image. Something to figure out. On another note, the upgrade to Lightroom Classic blitzed all of my presets, including VSCO presets that are no longer supported, so they have gone poof.
I’ve been chasing a more elementary path, but sympathize with your challenges. I’ve been using Nik presets with Elements for 6 years or so and very happy. Now the Nik programs keep crashing / freezing so I’ve been figuring out the direct adjustments in Elements. They feel cumbersome, and clunky, and and a bit muddy, but I’m getting there. Its also convincing me that if I payed more attention to the camera settings I could rely less on the software. All good lessons, just not the lessons I was planning on 🙂
Hi David, at this point I hesitate before using Nik. Color Efex Pro was once often used, but my trepidation is from images looking over-processed. I did enjoy the VSCO presets, they are what pushed me to start shooting film since I was using them constantly to move my images to that “look”. The M8, while an old camera having only 10 mp is the best digital camera I have used to achieve a desirable look. It has great limitations, but limits are liberating.
The Nik presets did not get removed. When I do use Nik, I edit with DXO’s program. The DXO group also owns Nik, and the two programs are integrated and work seamlessly together.
I’ve tried that path also, and still get crashes. I need to reach out to DXO and see if they have any advice. Also Intel to see if there might be a problem with my NUC. We occasionally get crashes unrelated to specific software.
I work from Macs. Capture One will not run on Macs with an M1 chip. Capture One is my preferred edit program. All in one.