DxO PhotoLab 10 has launched with a raft of new updates, and it’s available right now. DxO Labs is calling this latest incarnation of its flagship photo-editing software “our most powerful RAW editor yet.” And with all-new tools, powerful upgrades and boosted functionality, that certainly looks to be the case.

The headline feature is Depth Masks. An all-new tool that uses AI to form a depth map of the image in question. As DxO Labs product director, Cyril Duchêne said: “It will emulate the depth of field as if you were moving it directly with your lens. So it will help you select – precisely – a zone on your photo to edit it as if, for example, a ray of sun was touching just a part of that picture, naturally.” The mask is controlled via a series of sliders and adjustable feathering handles to create the desired effect.

PhotoLab’s standard AI masking has been treated to an upgrade, enabling it to identify “every person” in a photo. This is designed to allow photographers to group multiple people under one mask or tackle individuals with separate masking.

Portrait AI masking has also been enhanced with the introduction of face segmentation. A huge range of facial features, including eyebrows, eyes, facial hair, pupils and lips, are now selectable. This lives alongside existing selective masks for elements such as skies, subjects, animals and vehicles.

DxO’s U Point tech now features a Control Brush, allowing users to introduce hand-drawn custom shapes while maintaining the U Point workflow. New elliptical Control Points have also been added and AI Masks can now be combined with the U Point eyedropper, enabling users to select color and luminosity within the confines of an AI-generated mask.

That’s not the only color upgrade. DxO PhotoLab 10 brings with it a new “advanced” color grading tool. This exists within a single color wheel, with sliders for Hue, Saturation, Luminance and Balance. However, a neat little trick is the ability to move all plotted points on the color wheel in unison. As Cyril puts it: “That means you keep the balance you created at first (...) you can move all of them.”

DxO PhotoLab 10 also boasts a “seamless connection” with Canva’s free photo editor, Affinity. At the click of a button, you can open an image from PhotoLab directly in Affinity. And according to DxO, further enhancements are planned for releases in the future.

As you’d expect, there are also a range of quality-of-life upgrades. For example, the crop tool now features original as-shot ratios and you can make histogram adjustments within PhotoLibrary. DxO has also presided over improved folder management, database backup and restore tools. The software also boasts a new AI-powered RAW dust-removal tool.

DxO PhotoLab 10 is priced at $249.99 / £229.99 for a new perpetual license, while anyone upgrading from PhotoLab 8 or 9 can enjoy a discounted rate of $129.99 / £114.99. It's available for purchase now and can also be test-driven via a seven-day free trial.

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The filter that lives on my favorite camera lens a majority of the time is a diffusion filter, which gives light sources a glow that feels like a retro film lens. But now a new slider from Adobe is mimicking that retro effect – and it’s a new launch hidden inside Adobe Camera RAW.

While Photoshop got a major announcement last week with a new light adjustment layer, the new update to Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) came with little fanfare. ACR is Adobe’s RAW file converter that edits and preps RAW files before opening them inside Photoshop.

ACR now has a new slider called “Glow.” The new slider acts a lot like a digital version of a diffusion filter. As Adobe describes, “Glow spreads light from the brightest areas of your image into surrounding tones, creating everything from a subtle haze to a strong cinematic bloom.”

With the diffusion filter as one of my favorites, I immediately had to try out Adobe’s new Glow slider. The slider spreads out light sources in the photograph, but in spreading it out, the tool also seems to dim the light source just a bit.

Importantly, the glow tool works for all the brightest areas of the image, not necessarily just light sources. For example, when I used the tool to exaggerate a sun flare, it also emphasized the sun’s reflection off the building and obscured some of the details in those highlights.

Like any slider, there’s such a thing as going too far. At 100 percent in some shots I tried, the light-up windows in a city streetscape took on a more unnatural hard edge. That’s why the tool is built as a slider, giving photo editors the power to choose how much or how little of the effect to dial in.

But, there's a bit more control built into the new tool than just the overall slider. Clicking on the arrow next to the tool opens up additional sliders for more control, including adjustments for the amount of light spread.

A drop-down filter here also allows creators to choose from different types of glow effects, including halation and bloom, along with the standard diffusion. Bloom is my favorite, as this slider allows the light to spread into the darker portions of the image as well.

The new tool will also mimic the look of a warm diffusion filter by using the warmth slider.

The new glow slider is also available inside ACR's masking tools, which is useful if you want one light source to spread but not another.

Modern camera lenses are often built with multiple coatings that help suppress flare and ghosting. Vintage lenses often didn’t have these coatings – or at least had fewer of them – which is why film cameras tended to create a glow around light sources. A diffusion filter can help modern lenses mimic that look, but now there’s a tool to play around with before opening a RAW file inside Photoshop.

The new Glow Slider is located inside Adobe Camera RAW version 18.6 under the “Effects” section of tools, just underneath the grain tool.

Editing multiple RAW files tends to be easier in Lightroom than in ACR – so this is a slider that I really hope to see come to Lightroom next. It’s not uncommon for a tool to arrive in ACR before launching in Lightroom, like with the recent reflection removal tool, so I don’t think hoping for a similar Lightroom tool is too far-fetched.

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Photography technology has changed dramatically over the past two decades, but one principle remains central for Capture One: understanding how photographers actually work.

For CEO Rafael Orta, developing new tools is not simply about predicting trends. It starts with conversations, studio visits and listening to the people using the software every day.

"One of the things that I am personally most proud of about Capture One is that we speak to thousands of photographers every year," says Orta.

"And this is not an exaggeration or a number that I just picked out of thin air."

Listening before developing

Capture One regularly attends major photography events around the world, including industry shows, conferences, school visits and studio sessions.

But Orta says the relationship goes beyond simply showing products.

"We are a company that is truly, truly connected with the industry," he explains.

"It's not done in a detached, in an arms-length way. It’s actually done in a very physical way."

The company sends team members to meet photographers directly, from large international events to smaller studio visits where they can understand professional workflows in detail.

Orta gives an example and explains that Capture One team members recently visited studios in Paris to hear how photographers work and what challenges they face.

Those conversations help shape future products and services.

"We have an abundance of touch points that allow us to incorporate and understand what our customers need, but also how the industry is evolving," he says.

"The technology almost seems to melt away"

One area where Capture One sees continued importance is tethered shooting – a workflow where a camera is connected directly to a computer during a shoot, enabling images to appear instantly on a larger display.

Capture One says tethering remains a key part of professional photography, particularly when teams are collaborating on commercial shoots.

"It's such a central part of the Capture One experience," says Orta.

“You can have a team of people working around a photography shoot and the camera is connected to a workstation, and that immediately brings that team into the process.”

For Orta, the best technology is often the technology photographers barely notice.

"What we see is that the technology almost seems to melt away into the background," he explains.

"People start to talk about their photography and where they want to get to, and how they get to the creative vision that they have."

Capture One has committed to releasing tethering support for Hasselblad cameras before the end of the year, with the focus on reliability, speed and stability.

"The things that we care about are the speed of the file transfer and the reliability of that connection," says Orta.

"The day that we launch tethering, photographers will just be able to pick up their body, plug their cable there, and it’s just going to work seamlessly."

A small company with a global impact

Although Capture One is headquartered in Denmark with a team of around 122 people, the company also has offices in Greece, London and the US. Orta says the company’s influence reaches far beyond its size.

"We're this very, very specialized, very focused company from Denmark, but the impact that we have on global photography vastly outsizes the fact that we’re this specialized company," he says.

Capture One software is used across commercial photography, fashion, advertising, journalism, entertainment and other areas where images play an important cultural and commercial role.

Sometimes, Orta says, the company even notices its software appearing unexpectedly in films and television shows during photography scenes.

"It's something that is very, very unique to a company that has achieved this status and this position as an industry standard," he says.

For Capture One, the future of photography is not just about new technology – it is about continuing to support the people creating the images.

"We always do that in a very close relationship with our customers," Orta says.

"That's how we influence the way photography workflow works."

Explore Capture One's current plans and pricing, including a one-time purchase.

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For years, I thought finding your photographic style was something that happened naturally. You shot enough pictures, used enough cameras, tried enough lenses and, eventually, there it was. Your look. Your voice. Something that made an image unmistakably yours. But for me, that moment only really arrived when I stopped shooting in color.

That decision was not some short-lived experiment either. I have now been shooting predominantly in monochrome for more than four years, and I genuinely have not looked back. What started as a creative change quickly became the way I wanted to see the world through a camera. The longer I have stuck with it, the more natural it has become, to the point where I often find myself seeing scenes in black and white before I even raise the camera to my eye.

That might sound strange coming from someone who spent years working as a professional sports photographer. Back then, color was fundamental to what I did. The colors of the shirts, the advertising boards, the floodlights, the crowd, and the atmosphere were all part of telling the story. Sports photography is about immediacy, and color helps place you right there in the moment. I never really questioned it because it was simply part of the job.

But my photography has changed considerably since then. These days, I am far more interested in documenting the world around me. I want to photograph ordinary places, people, buildings, landscapes and little fragments of everyday life that might not appear particularly important today, but could become incredibly important in 20, 30 or 50 years. And strangely, removing color from those photographs has made me see those subjects more clearly than ever before.

Once I committed myself to monochrome, I started looking at light differently. I began noticing shadows, textures, shapes, and contrast rather than whether the colors within a scene worked together. I have deliberately pushed towards a heavier, higher-contrast black-and-white style, with deep blacks and strong highlights, and it has completely changed the way I approach a photograph. Instead of simply recording what is in front of me, I find myself thinking much more about how the scene will translate into tones.

That change did not happen overnight. Over the past four years, my eye has gradually adapted to the way I now want my photographs to look. I notice strong shafts of light falling across a pavement, the separation between a dark coat and a pale wall, the texture of an old stone building or the way mist flattens a distant landscape. These are the things that now catch my attention, and in many ways I think monochrome has trained me to be more selective and more deliberate.

There is also something wonderfully timeless about monochrome photography. I can photograph something this morning and, under the right conditions, the resulting image could almost have been made 40 or 50 years ago. Obviously, the world leaves clues about when a photograph was taken – cars, clothes, road signs and architecture all give the game away eventually – but black and white somehow removes that immediate timestamp that color can bring. It turns a contemporary photograph into something that already feels slightly archival.

That timeless quality has become increasingly important to me because I no longer want my photographs simply to say, “this is what this place looked like today.” I want them to feel like records. I want someone to be able to look at them decades from now and see not just a location, but a way of life, a mood and a moment that no longer exists in quite the same way.

That is probably why monochrome increasingly feels more documentary to me. I know that is entirely subjective, and documentary photography certainly does not need to be black and white, but when I look at the photographers whose work I find myself returning to, there is often a simplicity and permanence that comes from stripping away color. James Ravilious is a particularly good example. His photographs of rural England were not simply beautiful images of the countryside; they became records of communities, working lives, and ways of living that were gradually changing around him.

That idea resonates enormously with how I want to photograph now. I live in a part of England where so much still feels connected to an older way of life, but I am also very aware that it will not remain that way forever. Old buildings disappear. Independent shops close. Farms change. Villages expand. Traditional pubs are refurbished beyond recognition or vanish altogether. The things we walk past every day without thinking can suddenly become historically significant the moment they are gone.

The modern world moves incredibly quickly, and that makes me want to photograph these things while they are still here. It might be an old sign painted onto the side of a building, a farmer working in a field, a village shop that has barely changed in decades, or simply the way people gather in a particular place. None of these things necessarily feel important when you are standing in front of them, but photography has a wonderful habit of making the ordinary valuable with the passing of time.

And that is where I think monochrome has given my photography a greater sense of purpose. I am no longer simply waiting for beautiful light and making a nice photograph of something because it looks attractive. I am trying to make a record of it. Shooting in black and white somehow encourages me to treat even the most ordinary subjects with a little more seriousness, as though I am creating an archive rather than simply filling a memory card.

There is another benefit too. Removing color removes a distraction. A bright red car, a fluorescent shop sign, or someone wearing an especially vivid jacket can completely dominate a color photograph, even when that was never what initially interested me about the scene. In monochrome, those elements become shapes and tones instead, allowing me to decide what really matters within the frame.

That simplicity has also made me much more confident in my editing. I am no longer endlessly tweaking color temperature, saturation, or individual hues, trying to make an image feel right. My decisions are now much more focused around contrast, exposure, and tonality. Do I want the shadows to fall into darkness? Should that highlight remain bright? Does the image need more separation between the subject and the background? Those choices feel far more connected to the photograph itself rather than simply its color palette.

Perhaps most importantly, monochrome has finally given me the photographic eye I have been searching for. I now recognize the scenes I want before I even lift the camera. Harsh afternoon shadows, mist hanging over a field, weathered stone, an old shopfront, someone standing in a doorway – I can almost see the finished black-and-white photograph before I press the shutter. That certainty was something I never really had when I was constantly thinking about color.

Four years of shooting this way have made that instinct stronger. There is a consistency to my work now that I had struggled to find before, and that consistency is probably the closest thing I have ever had to what people call a photographic style. It is not about applying the same preset to every image or making everything look identical. It is about consistently being drawn towards the same kind of light, the same textures, the same subjects, and the same atmosphere.

And perhaps that is the biggest lesson monochrome has taught me. Style is not something you necessarily manufacture. Sometimes it appears when you remove the things that are getting in the way.

I spent a long time believing that developing a style meant finding a particular camera, lens, focal length, or editing preset. For me, it turned out to be much simpler. I just had to remove something. I stopped shooting in color more than four years ago, and I have not looked back. In doing so, I finally started seeing the photographs I had wanted to make all along.

See our guide to the best cameras for black-and-white photography

WATCH VIDEO: Live Masks explained

When shooting towards the sun at sunset, it can be tricky to record a balanced exposure. If we expose for the sky, the land looks too dark; but if we expose for the land, the sky can blow out.

At times like this it’s usually worth shooting a bracketed sequence of exposures, in which your camera will take under-and overexposed frames alongside the ‘correct’ exposure sandwiched in the middle of them. This way, you have several options.

You can pick the best exposure from the bunch, or merge the set to an HDR image, or blend the exposures later on. The last option usually involves opening two or more images into your editing software, then masking one image to blend it with another. This is where Live Masking in Affinity Photo can prove very useful.

There are three different kinds of Live Masks in Affinity: Hue, Luminosity and Band-pass. They will enable you to blend a layer with the layers below based on a set of parameters. Luminosity – which we’ve used here – enables us to blend based on the lightness values of pixels.

Effectively, it gives us a fine degree of control over blending light pixels on one layer with darker pixels on another – or vice versa. As such it’s very useful for exposure blending, as we can fill in an overexposed sky with a correctly exposed version in seconds.

Many of us will have lots of bracketed sets of exposures on our hard drives to try this technique out on. Open up a couple of images and try it, or download the Land.jpg and Sky.jpg pictures here to experiment with. We'll use those in the following steps…

1. Align the images

Download the start images (click here). Then, to ensure the two images are perfectly aligned, go to File > New Stack and load in the two images, ensure ‘Auto-align’ is checked and hit OK. Go to the Layers Panel and drag the two layers outside the stack to remove them from the group, then delete the group.

2. Add a Live Mask

With the darker layer on the top and highlighted, Alt-click the Layer Mask icon and choose Luminosity Range Mask. The left side represents shadows and the right is for highlights. Drag down on the line to make that part of the tonal range more transparent.

3. Fine-tune the blend

Adjust the line to fine-tune the masking. By making the line steeper, there is less of a gradual transition in the blending. The correct setting will depend on the image, so experiment. Soften the edges to reduce haloes by increasing the Blur Radius slider.

4. Mask the highlights

Click the dot icon to toggle the visibility on and off to check how it blends. Here the blend clouds out some of the brighter highlights in the land, so highlight the image thumbnail of the layer then click the mask icon. Paint black to hide parts of the top layer.

5. Boost the flowers

Click the Adjustment icon in the Layers Panel and choose HSL then increase Saturation. Next, Alt-click the Mask icon again and this time choose Hue Range Mask. Check Preview then click the picker and sample the purple flowers. Edit the colour wheel to fine-tune.

6. Clone to tidy

Click the New Layer icon in the Layers Panel to add a new layer at the top of the stack. Grab the Clone Stamp tool and set ‘Current and Below’ in the options at the top. Zoom in close to the horizon, Alt-click to sample a clean source and paint to tidy up any haloes.

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Skylum is making it very clear that the photographer comes first. That’s right, the company that helped pioneer AI-powered photo editing software, when it launched Luminar Neo (now Luminar) back in 2022, is reaffirming its stance on the relationship between creativity and artificial intelligence.

In a press release for the program’s latest update, Skylum’s CEO, Ivan Kutanin, addressed “growing concerns around tech affecting human talent,” and claimed that Luminar is taking a different approach, “one where technology helps photographers realize their creative potential, rather than overshadow it.”

This might seem a bit rich coming from a program packed with AI-powered tools, but it feels to me like a statement of intent. A promise, if you will, that Skylum will continue to develop its AI attributes, but not at the expense of the creative.

And indeed, Luminar’s current feature set is very much about enhancing existing photographs as opposed to generating an image out of nowhere.

You need look no further than the controversy surrounding EvotoAI at the beginning of the year to understand why Skylum might want to make its stance clear.

When an AI Headshot Generator briefly appeared on Evoto’s website, it received huge backlash from its user base. For a company that had marketed itself on putting professional photographers first, many felt that the move overstepped the mark.

Evoto apologized and explained that the release was a mistake, but the damage had already been done.

Removing friction, retaining authorship

I got to talk to Skylum’s CEO Ivan Kutanin regarding the shift in the company’s tone, where he was keen to point out that very little has changed: “It has never been about asking AI to replace creativity,” he said. “It is about using AI to remove the friction that stands between a person and their creative intent.”

My understanding of this is that Skylum’s goal is to help the photographer get where they want to go as quickly and as easily as possible, without taking away their creative autonomy.

As Ivan puts it: “Technology should expand photographers’ capabilities without taking authorship away from them,” adding that “the photographer should remain the decision-maker”.

As to why the company is so intent on making this clear now, the CEO explained: “As AI is becoming more powerful, this distinction becomes even more important.”

And Skylum has gathered the data to back this up, with internal research finding that “control, authenticity, and personal style are top priorities among photographers.” So much so that these attributes are more important than both speed and automation.

“What they need is AI assistance that understands the image, reduces repetitive work, suggests possibilities and makes difficult techniques more accessible.” Skylum’s goal, then, is to provide AI tools that integrate “seamlessly” into Luminar’s workflow.

“We want the technology to disappear into the workflow and simply help photographers’ creative minds do their magic,” said Ivan.

He used the software’s Atmosphere and Enhance tools as examples. The latter intelligently applies a wide range of tonal adjustments including shadows, contrast, and saturation, in one fell swoop. However, it’s still controlled via a traditional slider.

“AI is not about 'press a button and let AI create.' It is a much deeper collaboration between human creativity and machine intelligence,” he said.

Still an AI photo editing pioneer

I couldn’t help but wonder if all this meant that Skylum’s priorities regarding AI had changed, but Ivan assured me it hasn’t.

“Using technology to expand photographers’ creativity rather than replace it has always been part of our values,” he said. “With this release, no actual change is coming – we are simply underlining what’s been here all along.”

And for existing Luminar fans, that means continuing to strive for improvement but not at the expense of the company’s AI mantra.

Ivan told me that the team is working on tech that’s “more advanced than ever,” but building a clever feature isn’t enough. It must be something that “genuinely helps photographers express their creative vision.”

Luminar update

The latest update will be released in two phases, with the first phase having already been released on August 05. The second phase is set to launch this fall.

As it stands, you can expect enhancements to the user interface and genAI tools. Export speeds that are up to 25% faster. Masking that uses 33% less RAM. Preset previews that load four times faster. And support for the following new cameras: Panasonic Lumix L10, Sony A7 V and Sony A7R VI.

The fall phase is set to feature a more precise and intelligent Crop tool. Atmosphere – Fog, which is said to give users “a more natural way to shape the mood of their photographs.” Improvements to both AI Assistant and Enhance AI. As well as the introduction of a new Web Editor, boosting its cross-platform workflow via browser support.

Skylum isn’t the only photo editing company affirming its stance on AI. This week, Digital Camera World interviewed Capture One CEO Rafael Orta who said: “We think of ourselves as a photography company… we never had any disposition to reinvent ourselves as an AI company.”

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Artificial intelligence is changing photography at a remarkable pace. From editing assistance to image enhancement, AI-powered tools are becoming part of everyday workflows – but they are also raising important questions about creativity, ownership and the future role of photographers.

For Capture One CEO Rafael Orta, the answer is not about rejecting new technology. Instead, it is about ensuring that technology remains connected to photography itself.

"We think of ourselves as a photography company and we think of ourselves as part of the photography industry specifically," Orta says. "We're a photography company. We're at the service of photographers. We're at the service of the craft."

A photography company in the AI era

Capture One has been developing editing software for more than 30 years, originally helping professional photographers transition from film-based workflows into digital photography.

As AI has become increasingly important in imaging technology, Orta says the company's identity has remained consistent.

"We never had a crisis of identity," he explains. "We never had any disposition to reinvent ourselves as an AI company."

Instead, Capture One sees AI as another technology that can support photographers – provided it is developed with the industry's needs in mind.

"What that has allowed us to do is to look at AI as a technology that has some utility for the photography workflows," says Orta.

The key question, he explains, is not simply what AI can achieve, but how it can be integrated responsibly.

"Looking at it from the perspective of what are the things that we have to protect as we think about these technologies as it relates to the industry."

Putting photographers' rights first

One of the biggest concerns surrounding AI in creative industries is how images are sourced and used.

For Orta, this is an issue that feels particularly important because photography is deeply embedded within Capture One itself. Many members of the team are photographers, meaning questions around image ownership and attribution are not abstract discussions.

"We have a very significant population of photographers. They're part of the team," he says.

"We're very particular about credits and usage."

That principle applies even internally, where images used for presentations and marketing must include correct attribution and usage information.

"If I put up a photo in a presentation and I haven't credited the photographer, someone in the team is going to call me out," Orta says.

This same approach influences how Capture One develops its AI-powered features.

"When we build our software and AI models, we're completely conscious of what we can use to train them and whether we have the rights to use that material."

Building tools around photographers

Capture One has introduced AI-assisted features, including tools for face retouching, denoising and image enhancement, but Orta says the company has deliberately avoided making AI the centerpiece of the user experience.

"You may notice that we no longer label our tools AI," he explains.

"They just have a label for Retouch Faces, for example, Enhance Denoise. All of these tools have really, really powerful technology underneath them."

Rather than promoting the technology itself, Capture One wants photographers to focus on the creative task they are trying to accomplish. For Orta, AI should feel like another tool in the workflow, not the headline feature.

"We define ourselves as a photography company," he says. "Within the greater ecosystem of the industry, our contribution is that we build software – but we do it in the interest of the industry and photographers."

As AI continues to evolve, Capture One's philosophy remains the same: use new technology where it genuinely benefits photographers, while ensuring the craft – not the algorithm – remains at the centre of the creative process.

Explore Capture One's current plans and pricing, including a one-time purchase.

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A high-resolution Hasselblad file is only the beginning of the creative process. For professional photographers, the software that interprets those images can be just as important as the camera itself.

Now, Capture One is expanding its professional workflow with support for three Hasselblad cameras – the X2D II 100C, the X2D 100C and the CFV 100C digital back – bringing the Swedish manufacturer’s medium format files into an ecosystem widely used across commercial, fashion, beauty and advertising photography.

For Capture One CEO Rafael Orta, the partnership represents more than simply adding another camera system. It is the result of years of requests from photographers who wanted Hasselblad files supported in a professional editing workflow.

"Supporting Hasselblad cameras had been something that had been requested by photographers using Capture One for quite a long time," Orta explains.

“And it's really great to be able to offer that now.”

The partnership photographers have been waiting for

Capture One has built its reputation around giving photographers control over their images, particularly in industries where color accuracy and consistency are critical.

"Capture One is widely considered the industry standard, especially for commercial and fashion and beauty and advertising photography," says Orta.

"The proposition that we bring to photographers is that our product gives them tremendous flexibility in terms of the workflow that they choose to use and the devices that they choose to use together with Capture One."

That approach has led the software to support more than 550 cameras throughout its history, but Orta says every camera requires a dedicated process.

"We create camera profiles. It’s a labour of love," he says. "It's something that we do individually for each specific camera."

The craft behind camera profiles

Rather than relying only on technical specifications, Capture One engineers test cameras extensively, photographing in controlled environments as well as outdoors to understand how each system handles color and detail.

"Every one of those cameras is a camera that we have touched, that we have held in our hands, that we have taken hundreds and in many cases thousands of photos with," says Orta.

The aim is to create profiles that behave predictably while preserving Capture One's own approach to image quality.

"We apply all of our experience and knowledge of image quality and color science to the images that we saw coming from these cameras," he explains.

For photographers opening Hasselblad files in Capture One for the first time, Orta believes the difference comes from the creative control the software provides.

"They see more detail, they see things that they maybe hadn't seen before," he says.

"They start nudging sliders in one direction or another, they see these adjustments being applied, and how it flatters their photography."

Capture One's role is not to replace the photographer's vision, though.

"Ultimately what we’re doing is returning control to the photographer," says Orta.

A partnership built around color

The collaboration between Capture One and Hasselblad also represents two companies with deep roots in Scandinavian imaging technology.

Orta says there is a long history of color expertise across the region, from high-quality printing industries to digital image processing.

"It's fascinating to see how some of the names that stand for quality in terms of the image and colors, but also stability and reliability and quality in engineering, have come from the Scandinavian region," he says.

While the initial release supports three recent 100MP Hasselblad cameras, Orta says the company is open to expanding support in the future.

"We're looking forward to broadening the number of cameras that are supported," he says.

For now, the focus is on seeing what photographers create with the new combination.

"We're really looking forward to seeing what photography is going to be created now using Hasselblad cameras and Capture One," Orta says.

"It really feels like a big moment for the industry."

Explore Capture One's current plans and pricing

When you don't have a studio but love using light, you go through a whole series of gear changes before landing on something that actually works. For the self-taught photographer, that usually means progressing through the ‘strobist’ journey, learning off-camera flash with small speedlights before gradually realizing their limitations.

Your typical early setup might include three speedlights, a few lightweight stands, some white shoot-through umbrellas and maybe a snoot. It's compact, accessible and barely takes up any room. I definitely went through this phase, with additional radio transmitters and receivers back before they were built into flashes.

The trouble starts outdoors on a bright day. You're at full power with all three flashes zoomed into one umbrella – and it's still not enough to balance against the daylight.

Worse, you're shooting at f/22 just to keep your shutter speed below 1/250 sec – the dreaded sync speed. Go above that and the flash doesn't cover the whole frame. Bare flash almost cuts it, but it's not flattering and everything is in focus.

So you investigate higher-power lights and the modifiers to go with them. I went to the Elinchrom Quadra pack-and-head system – a 400Ws setup that I still have in boxes around the studio – but these are long out of vogue and there are far more options available now.

You discover high speed sync for creamy, shallow-focus portraits or start using neutral density filters to the same end. Both techniques eat into your power budget, pushing you into 400-600Ws territory. You need heavier light stands and, because you're still working on location, you need modifiers that pack down compactly.

So where does that leave things now?

I run two location setups: one very compact kit for indoors and a main system for most commercial jobs. Both are built around a three-light configuration: key light, fill / separation and background.

The compact kit started with three Godox V850II speedlights, but I've since moved to using two Godox AD100 Pros for more power in a smaller package. The key modifier here is the SMDV Flip 32, a wonderful octabox that opens in seconds, has a built-in stand adapter, and can be angled to suit your shot – similar in concept to the Profoto Clic system.

The stands are Manfrotto Nanos. A specific ring locks the AD100 in place on the Flip 32, though equivalent rings are available for V850-style speedlights. Depending on the shoot I might bring additional modifiers – a Godox snoot and a SmallRig FS30120 strip softbox (a 30x120cm box, hence the numbers!).

These are shared with the main system, mounted via Godox S2 brackets for Bowens-mount compatibility. The SmallRig in particular uses a quick setup and release system unlike anything else I've used. If I need additional light, I use one of the V850IIs I still have.

The main system is built around the Godox AD600BM (also sold as the rebranded Pixapro Citi600). These take Bowens modifiers directly and are more compact than the Elinchrom ELX 500s I use in the studio.

Alongside the FS30120 strips shared with the compact kit, I use the LA-90 Octa, which has a similar fast-assembly system. Stands are Neewer air-cushioned. Usually I travel with two lights, but I do have a third as backup, and sometimes I want a three-light setup (coupled with an additional FS30120.

I also use a version where I have the octa in front with an eye-lighter and a Lastolite (now Manfrotto) Hilite. Both systems are triggered by the Godox X3 – a compact touchscreen unit that handles the whole setup cleanly.

The weak point is transport. The main system currently splits across two Neewer bags – one for stands and umbrellas, one for lights and softboxes – which works for easy trunk storage but isn't ideal, no wheels for getting to the location from the car being the main issue.

The plan is to consolidate into a Think Tank Production Manager 40 rolling case, once I've confirmed the fit with the trunk of the car.

For a today version of this, you could reasonably use the AD100Pro II versions for the compact setup and the AD600Pro II for the main system – or even the AD400Pro II if you want a smaller size for about two-thirds lower power.

Best of all, you can use all the lights I’ve listed together, for those shots where you need more control or practicals on set. I’m not really sure I need eight lights on set, but you never know!

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ISO is a complicated subject that’s often contorted into an overly simple solution: keep it as low as possible.

But many mirrorless camera sensors feature something called dual-gain, dual-native or dual-base ISO – and if that doesn’t sound particularly familiar, it could change the way you shoot forever.

How low can you go? The ISO myth

I personally think that photography journalists (*ahem* like me…) are to blame for the oversimplification of ISO.

Back in print publishing’s heyday, landscape photography was the magic sauce. Stick a stunning vista on the front cover of a magazine with a tasty landscape-themed coverline and the issue would sell like hotcakes.

As such, a lot of beginner photography techniques are biased toward landscape photography. And when you’re set up on a tripod it makes absolute sense to keep your ISO as low as possible, because you’re less bothered about your shutter speed.

But if you’re capturing street snaps or fast-moving wildlife, suddenly a low ISO becomes impractical.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve judged over a hundred photography competitions, and the number one mistake that I see again and again is soft images from photographers who evidently think that noise is more egregious than camera shake. It’s not.

Dual-native ISO

There’s another reason why you shouldn’t fear raising your ISO. Many modern mirrorless cameras feature dual ISO technologies, often referred to as dual gain, dual native or dual base. Let’s get some jargon out of the way first…

• Native ISO: A camera’s ISO range in which the analog signal is boosted.
• Expanded ISO: Sits either side of the native ISO range, expanding the signal digitally beyond analog means, making noise much more apparent.
• Base ISO: At the bottom value of the native ISO range, this is an unboosted ISO value that creates the cleanest images. In a dual or triple-base ISO setting, it acts as a baseline in which to provide the best image quality possible but will still be amplified to a degree.

A conventional camera features one analog circuit, which is boosted to increase light sensitivity. Dual-native ISO features two analog circuits. The idea behind this is that it allows for two base ISOs. For example, you might have a base ISO at ISO64 and ISO800.

This can even mean that shooting at the second base ISO will provide better image clarity than some lower ISOs. For example, if you’re shooting at ISO640, you might as well bump it up to ISO800 so you can benefit from a faster shutter speed and still end up with no noticeable drop in image quality – and possibly end up with even better results.

Different cameras have different circuits and can even differ from stills to video or between video formats. For example, the Nikon Z9 has base ISOs of ISO64 and ISO500 for stills, and ISO800 and ISO4000 for video when shooting in N-Log.

Some manufacturers aren’t particularly good at promoting their cameras’ dual-native ISO capabilities – and Nikon is one such manufacturer. A recent article on Nikon Rumors highlights this. I was well aware of the Nikon Z9, Nikon Z8, Nikon Z6 III and Nikon Zf, but had no idea that the Nikon Z6 II, Nikon Z7 II, Nikon Z7 and Nikon Z6 had dual-gain sensors.

This is likely because the technology is much more prevalent within the video sphere, which makes sense.

Videographers are more exposed when it comes to noise-reduction techniques. Photographers can capture long exposures, exposure stack to capture more dynamic range, implement flash, and noise-reduction is much easier for photographers.

Not to be confused with DGO

There’s another technology called Dual Gain Output [DGO], but this operates differently to dual-gain or dual-native ISO by essentially using the dual circuit simultaneously.

This means that the camera captures two images, one on the low-gain circuit and one on the high-gain circuit, before blending them into one image. The theory is that by using the low-gain circuit to capture the highlights and the high-gain circuit to capture the shadows, you end up with better image quality.

And that’s not all; the Canon EOS C400 cinema camera introduced the world to triple-base ISO, which works exactly like the aforementioned dual-base ISO, but features three analog circuits for even greater noise-reducing capabilities.

So, as always, for besty results you need to really familiarize yourself with your camera and its capabilities. Look up what your sensor can actually do and you might be astonished at how you can use it in the real world, not just abiding by "old magazine logic"!

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If you go to any photo trade show, the number of LED makers far exceeds the number of strobe and flash makers. We’ve had brands like Bowens fold in recent years, even though their mount is the de facto standard for lighting modifiers. Even small flash makers aren’t immune to this, with Cactus, one of the first to get a trigger and flash combo that worked across a huge range of camera makers. This triggers the question, is flash, be it studio strobes or hotshoe flashguns, dead?

Well, it might be for some photographers. When working with flash, you can’t see the results before you shoot. Even in a controlled studio environment, where you have the modelling lights mimic the flash power, it’s still an approximation. You also need to communicate between the camera and the strobe, meaning expensive wireless triggers, or awkward cables. Not to mention learning how to use the flash, set groups and channels, turn on and off beeps – it’s kind of a steep learning curve for a beginner. And at high power you have to wait patiently for the recycle time.

With LED, you just turn it on and look through the lens (now that we’re nearly all mirrorless) or live view. What you see is what you get. Need more, or to balance two lights? Just look and use the handy remote to change each one from where you are, no camera connection required. Need them to be different colors? Well, just change that too. If you’re also creating content as well as photographing, you get to use the same light for photos and for video. Sometimes that will mean a tripod and longer exposures, but that's easy. It’s not looking good for flash, really.

But wait, does flash have anything going for it? You mean like really fast duration, over 1/10,000sec bursts to freeze motion? Capturing droplets and splashes? Freezing athletes in mid air? Yes, it can do that. LED not so much.

Flash easily overpowers sunlight, even with modifiers. You’d need hefty and very expensive lights to do that. Cinema does that using 10,000-watt HMIs and large scrims, but at $15,000, you’d be better served with flashes for photography. Speaking of modifiers, these are mature in the flash space and highly engineered. LEDs don’t get as hot as traditional bulbs, but they are half heatsink and do need cooling-not all modifiers are designed for this.

Of course, good flash also has perfect color rendition from shot to shot, whereas that can really vary with LED. Even the same setting on two lights might not be exactly the same colour-it might be subtle, but noticeable. Not all flashes are equal, but most current ones have this consistency.

On the portability front, I get 650 full power flashes from my Godox AD600. I can go shoot after shoot before needing to charge, even shooting all day. An LED? Maybe two hours if I’m lucky. Battery tech is improving, but still hard to touch strobes for battery longevity. A good day in the studio will fix any issues, and another day outside learning to balance flash and ambient and the learning curve is done.

So is flash dead? For video/photo creators working inside, especially at the low end of the market, probably. For those shooting higher end, requiring accurate color and control, indoors and outdoors, flash is still king.

See our guides to the best flashguns, the best LED light panels, and the best lighting kits for photography

Unlike the aforementioned Frankenstein this particular portrait project doesn’t require you to scour mortuaries or dig up body parts from the local cemetery. All the facial elements are coming from the same person, but once assembled will produce something as weird or wonderful (but mainly weird) as you like. There are different ways of capturing each feature, as well, but the basic plan is to take a head and shoulders shot with a portrait lens, or 50-100mm focal length lens. You can go with a wide aperture and completely throw the background out of focus, but also soften features in front of or further back from the focal point. Or, you can use an f/8 aperture and try to get the base image all in focus.

You then need to switch to a macro lens and shoot close up images of each facial element – eyes, nose, mouth, ears are the basics – but it’s worth including other parts like the forehead or chunks of neck. Don’t be afraid to get pretty close to fill the frame, because otherwise you’ll need to select and mask off parts of these close up images. You can go for detail, with a narrow aperture, or throw it wide open and just add the shallow depth of field to the sense of unreality. The trick is to shoot the close ups from different angles or with different expressions than the main image. Then it’s time to compose your creation.

How to create a bizarre portrait

1 Shoot the baseline portrait

The baseline image is the one onto which everything else will be added. Use a portrait lens to capture a head and shoulders portrait. Either go wide with an aperture such as f/1.8 or add more depth and detail with a narrower aperture such as f/8.

2 Capture the close-ups

Switch to a macro or close-focusing lens for close-up shots of individual features. Use a wide aperture to avoid having to increase the ISO if you're struggling for light. Ask your subject to exaggerate their expressions for a wilder aesthetic.

3 Start your composite

Load your base portrait into your chosen photo editing software then drop in the individual photos. Resize to fit, rotate some for effect and use masks to remove unwanted parts. Also, add a white border! Save the project so you can make variations and then flatten the layers and export your creation as a JPEG.

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Often in photography, less is more. And in the case of abstract images, such as this stunning close-up from Chris See Casas, a simplified composition can create drama.

"I am researching water photography for my thesis and stumbled upon an article teaching how to do creative macro photography," explains Chris. "I had this urge to try it immediately, and all sorts of creative juices flowed from there on."

Describing her thought process, Philippines-based Chris says: "I wanted a photo that would create greater awareness regarding the importance of every water drop in an interesting way – most of the photos I see of water drops are too formal.

"This is the main reason I chose to shoot it in macro. I discovered the use of long exposure creatively in the process."

In high-magnification images, careful lighting and exposure is of critical importance, since any imbalances are immediately noticeable in the tightly composed frame.

Chris encountered several challenges shooting this image. "The first was finding the proper equipment to produce crisp light streaks. I experimented with many kinds of reflective surfaces and lighting equipment – flashlight, mini pin light and pen light.

"I used the pen light in the end – it works in wonderful ways! Secondly, identifying the proper way to point the light at the subject.

"I did many trials before landing a good shot like this. Thirdly, time; a lot of it was spent experimenting to get a shot this interesting. Long exposure and macro photography combined requires lots of patience."

The end result was a shot that Chris feels is unique and impossible to exactly recreate. In her own words: "I cannot replicate this one. Ever."

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Hasselblad is a well-loved medium format camera system – but one of the brand's biggest requests has finally been answered: more native RAW file support across third-party photo editing apps.

Today, Hasselblad announced native RAW file support inside the popular photo editor Capture One. The company says that tethered camera support will follow later this year.

RAW files from cameras like the Hasselblad X2D II 100C – the “finest stills camera ever made” according to my colleague James Artaius – are packed with 100MP resolution and dynamic range.

But while Adobe Lightroom and Camera RAW support the 3FR file format, Hasselblad’s RAW file format isn’t widely compatible with some of the most well-known Adobe competitors. That left photographers opening the files and working with the colors in Hasselblad’s Phocus software for the best color rendering before exporting as a TIFF and importing into other programs.

With Capture One support, the announcement removes an extra step for Hasselblad photographers working with one of the best Lightroom alternatives.

Hasseblad says those files open natively inside the photo editor, including support for the camera's dedicated color profiles. The collaboration also supports lens profiles for Hasselblad glass, enabling lens profile correction inside Capture One.

Capture One support includes file handling for the RAW files from the X2D II 100C, the X2D 100C, and the CFV 100C digital back and is available in version 16.8.3 of Capture One, as well as the mobile version 3.3.4.

“Photographers have asked us to bring Hasselblad’s image quality into Capture One’s platform for years,” said Rafael Orta, CEO, Capture One.

“This partnership delivers exactly that, empowering even more photographers with everything they need, from initial inspiration to final image. It’s a collaboration the photography community has wanted for a long time, and we’re glad it’s finally here.”

New users can also try a free seven-day trial for Capture One.

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For professional photo and video editors, any improvement to workflow can make a huge difference. Time is money, after all, so reducing the friction during post-production can mean more jobs in less time.

TourBox's pro tier of Creative Consoles provide arguably the ultimate interface whether you're editing, color grading, drawing or designing. Other controllers offer limited input actions and functions, but TourBox's professional devices offer single-hand, eye-free control for high-performance, precision post-production.

Right now you can save up to $117 / £117 on the entire Tourbox range, with Creative Consoles offering instinctive editing for everyone from enthusiast to expert. But for working pros, investing in a TourBox Elite or TourBox Elite Plus will skyrocket your productivity.

With these one-handed consoles there's no more dragging or searching – you can fully customize all shortcuts, mouse actions, plugins and macros.

Putting a creative toolbox literally at your fingertips, the TourBox Elite series offers full-process eye-free control with eleven Buttons and three knobs to click, scroll, spin, twist, single-click, double-click and execute any combined actions.

From Photoshop and Affinity to DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro – or even if you're just navigating spreadsheets and web browsers – cut down the wasted motion and increase your productivity and creativity.

🇺🇸 US deal

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The software giant behind popular photo and video editors like Photoshop and Premiere will soon own the popular AI-focused photo and video software brand Topaz Labs.

On June 25, Adobe announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Topaz Labs, a move that Adobe says will bring more on-device AI tools into Adobe Creative Cloud and Firefly. At the same time, Adobe says that Topaz Labs apps will continue to be available as separate programs.

For Adobe’s Photoshop, Lightroom, and Premiere users, the acquisition means that their existing workflow could soon be updated with some of Topaz Lab’s popular tools. Adobe has already integrated Topaz Labs as a partner model for the popular Bloom and Gigapixel AI upsizing tools, but the integration likely means additional tech from Topaz Labs will make its way into Firefly and Creative Cloud apps.

The move could also bring more on-device AI into Adobe software, as Adobe notes that Topaz Lab’s Neurostream technology, which allows larger complex AI models to run locally on devices, is part of the acquisition.

Topaz Labs Studio is a multi-app suite of tools built around enhancing photos and videos using AI. Topaz Lab’s current portfolio includes:

• Video: A program boosting slow-mo, stabilization, and resolution in videos
• Photo: An AI program for correcting focus, removing noise, and increasing resolution
• Gigapixel: An AI software that can upsize low-resolution images by as much as 6x
• Image: A web browser application for correcting and enhancing images with beginner-friendly controls
• Mosaic: An AI program built specifically for restoring old photographs
• Bloom: A program for enhancing clarity and detail
• Astra: A generative upscaling program for video

Adobe expects the deal to close sometime in the second half of 2026, with Topaz Labs CEO Eric Yang continuing to lead the Topaz team after the transfer.

Like Adobe’s Creative Cloud, Topaz Lab’s software is subscription-based, though the company offers more than one type of subscription with an annual subscription, an annual paid monthly subscription, or a monthly subscription option.

Adobe and Topaz Labs have not yet commented on whether the acquisition will bring pricing changes, good or bad – though the companies have confirmed that the Topaz Labs apps will remain available separately.

When Adobe added Topaz Labs models into some Photoshop tools, the software giant added the tools as a partner model that requires generative credits. It’s unclear if additional Topaz Labs tools would follow the same pattern. While some Adobe-made tools, like the remove tool, do not use generative credits, others do.

Additional details about how the two separate software suites will interact will likely come once the acquisition is finalized, with the deal expected to be completed before the end of 2026.

Êditor’s note: This is a breaking news story; check back for updates

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I have to admit, as both a photographer and a tech journalist there are some new product launches that are, well, boring. V-flats are usually one of them, flat pieces of foam core used as both lighting tools and easy backdrops. But lighting giant Westcott has just re-invented the v-flat – and made it not only portable but washable.

The new Westcott V-Flat, announced this week, uses fabric and an aluminum stand with magnetic legs rather than foam core. The design reminds me more of a scrim than a v-flat, but the design looks far more portable and durable than the standard foam core.

A typical v-flat is a large piece of foam core that’s versatile, but unwieldy to pack. The foam also often dents easily, making it a photography staple that tends to need semi-regular replacing.

V-flats are often loved for their versatility, and Wescott has worked to keep that intact as well. The design uses two panels that open to a full 82 by 84 inch / 208 x 213cm surface that can be used both as a lighting tool or a simple backdrop.

The two sides of the v-flat can also tilt from 15 to 80 degrees, allowing photographers to create a wedge wall or intentionally create a small slice of light entering the frame.

The fabric is interchangeable. The black can be used to enhance shadows and help prevent unwanted light from the outside the scene from entering the shot. The white can be used to bounce light and create softer studio lighting.

The fabric on the new Westcott V-Flat can be tossed in the washing machine to clean, and Westcott also offers replacement fabric.

A two-color kit with both fabrics and one frame retails for $299 / £255 / AU$442 / CA$434, while two-stand packs, single packs, and replacement fabric are also available. The new v-flat system is available directly from Wescott, while a number of retailers have already opened pre-orders, including B&H in the US.

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When you're starting your editing journey, getting the look you want for your photos and video can be challenging enough. But navigating endless menus and mouse clicks can be overwhelming, and the whole process feels like trying to edit your images with boxing gloves on.

That's where TourBox's Creative Consoles come into play. Using a keyboard and mouse to edit can feel like misery, but Tourbox's ergonomic devices with physical dials and dedicated buttons literally give you fingertip control over your post-production tools. They instantly unlock the potential of your software, your images and your creativity!

Right now you can save up to $117 / £117 on the entire Tourbox range, with Creative Consoles offering instinctive editing for everyone from beginner through to pro – but if you're just starting your editing journey, take my word for it, investing in a TourBox Lite or TourBox Neo is the surest way to supercharge your skills.

These one-hand editing stations enable you to break free from complex workflows and remove the friction between your brain and your fingers for faster, easier, better post-production.

TourBox conducted a test with a creator using hand-tracking data, and found that using a Creative Console dramatically reduced movements and increased efficiency by 170% – slashing the total time from 219.5 mins to just 79.5 mins!

Whether you're an aspiring content creator or an enthusiast photographer, and whatever you're using from Photoshop and Affinity to DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro – or even just navigating spreadsheets and browsers – cut down the wasted motion and increase your productivity and creativity.

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We’ve quickly got used to AI improving the AF performance of our digital cameras. And now, increasingly, when it comes to further enhancing resultant shots in AI-powered image processing software, including the likes of Evoto AI and Luminar Neo. I’ve recently had a go with the latest iterations of both and one thought struck me.

It feels like cheating.

It also feels like relinquishing control, as the AI tools make visual decisions that – while producing perfectly acceptable-looking results – aren’t necessarily mirroring the decisions I would personally have taken, or the edits I’d have made. Am I happy getting generic results, rather than authentic expressions of my identity?

That said, there’s no denying I can get results a whole lot quicker – and I can imagine professionals, facing an edit of hundreds of images from a portrait or wedding shoot, will be tempted to batch process. It’s not like their clients are going to know that they had help from an AI toolkit.

However, in asking AI to make creative calls on our behalf, do we run the risk of becoming less creative ourselves – and downright lazy?

The tried-and-tested mantra for any jobbing photographer has always been to ‘get it right in camera’, as the primary way to avoid spending hours cleaning up or adjusting images in Photoshop.

If now, with AI, I can get similar-looking – or certainly ‘good enough’ – results in seconds, where’s the motivation to go the extra mile at the outset, or get exposure and depth of field spot-on, while my subject is still in front of my lens?

The counter-argument, of course, is that with such programs promising to speed up our workflow and help us avoid tedious, repetitive tasks, photographers will have more time to devote to the ‘fun’ part of taking the pictures. Or even less fun things, such as filing company accounts with the taxman.

I guess it all comes down to whether we see AI image editing software as a method to maximize our hard-earned skills and take our visual expertise up a notch – after all, it pays to have a decent image to work with in the first place – as well as a timesaver. Or whether we view it as a sticking plaster, or crutch, to make good our own deficiencies or occasional errors.

Perhaps exposure to too much ‘AI slop’ is rewiring our brains and encouraging and excusing our own photographic sloppiness. Or, more positively, is what photographers are wrestling with now more akin to the transition from film to digital, when we potentially ended up with many more ‘keepers’ because we could quickly see the result?

Whether we’re producing images au naturel or aided and abetted by AI, I think what matters most is still our personal judgement. If the result looks great then it’s a keeper, however I’ve reached that stage. If it looks crap, then I’m still reaching for the ‘delete’ button… whatever the robots are suggesting.

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For the longest time, learning photo editing has gone hand-in-hand with learning photography. But I just came across an interesting statistic hinting that a majority of adults actually prefer unedited photographs.

According to research by Getty Images’ VisualGPS, 65% of adults globally prefer brands that use real, unedited photos in ads.

My first thought: Finally. My second thought: Why am I spending so much time editing when a majority actually prefer an authentic look anyway?

The photographs used to advertise brands have been gradually shifting towards a less edited approach. For example, brands like Aerie have been leaving models unretouched since 2014. Dove launched a campaign using a variety of body types in 2004, banned excessive Photoshop in 2021 and vowed never to use AI models in 2024.

But while the move towards real skin and real people to represent brands has been happening gradually over the last decade, I think AI may be the final push.

The photos that I come across in my feed with too-perfect skin has me immediately suspecting that the photograph isn’t a photograph but an AI-generated image. Too many of them aren’t AI at all, but over-edited photographs.

Yes, AI is getting so good that it will generate skin that actually has texture. But nothing makes me scroll past a portrait faster than one with plastic skin.

The increasing number of adults who prefer non-edited photos caught my attention not just as a photographer, but as the mother to a pre-teen daughter. I’m so glad that I’m starting to see fewer photos of impossible perfection (I’m looking at you, terrible skin-smoothing smartphone filters!)

As a portrait photographer, I prioritize flattering light over intense Photoshop editing. Soft light will make the skin appear smoother while leaving in some natural texture, whereas hard light will overexaggerate pores and texture. I still do a light retouch but, especially in the era of AI, my editing style leans towards a natural look.

Notably the statistic comes from Getty, a stock image platform that has been vocal in its lean towards more authentic imagery. The statistic also focuses on brand photography, and doesn’t necessarily mean that portrait and wedding clients may prefer the same thing.

But between the pushback against AI and the rise of retro film cameras with imperfect but authentic images, I think it’s time for photographers to reevaluate their editing style.

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Photoshop can now rename and organize layers, resize projects, or swap out a background with a simple text prompt. On June 18, Adobe launched an AI agent across several Creative Cloud apps, including Photoshop and Premiere, allowing the long-standing editing programs to carry out multi-step processes with a text prompt.

The AI Assistant inside Photoshop and Premiere is rolling out beginning today, June 18, in public beta after Adobe previously teased that the feature was coming back in October during Adobe Max.

Photoshop’s AI Assistant was previously only available as a beta feature in Photoshop Web, the browser-based photo editor with a more limited number of tools. I tested the AI Assistant on Photoshop Web, and at times it felt like an overenthusiastic intern, but the experience left me with the impression that the AI assistant could perhaps one day handle the more boring photo editing tasks.

That’s exactly what Adobe is trying to do with the public beta rollout of AI Assistant across several Creative Cloud apps. Inside Photoshop, for example, the AI Assistant can carry out the process of resizing photos for different formats and platforms and even rename and organize layers.

In a demonstration, Adobe showed how the AI Assistant could also proofread graphic designs inside Photoshop, looking for more than spelling but factual inaccuracies as well.

Inside Premiere, the AI Assistant can help video editors organize assets into bins, batch rename clips based on their content, and add markers. Creators working with multiple camera angles of the same scene can also ask the AI to sync the time codes on those files and stack them inside the timeline.

When I tried the earlier beta version inside Photoshop Web, the potential to let the AI carry out more tedious, repetitive tasks felt like a modern AI take on Actions, the Photoshop tool that records your editing steps so that it can repeat them on another image – only the AI doesn’t need you to manually carry out the steps first.

But, the other feature that struck me about the Photoshop Web version of the AI Assistant is that it could also be used as a learning tool. When I asked the chatbot how to do something, it showed me the steps and where the tools were located – the AI Assistant doesn’t necessarily have to carry out the full edit for you.

When I tried that early AI Assistant back in March, the AI had some flaws and limitations. When I asked it for help editing flyaway hairs, for example, the chatbot removed the entire person – but at least apologized for doing so.

As a public beta, I suspect there are still some refinements left to do on Photoshop’s AI Assistant. But, one of my chief complaints was that using the AI bot was often slow – I’m hoping the rollout to the fully fledged Photoshop that isn’t 100 percent reliant on an internet connection will help create a faster experience.

Photo and video editors will be able to test out the AI Assistant as the feature rolls out on public beta.

The June 18 announcements also include news that Adobe is bringing its Creative Agent into Google Gemini. Like the tool already inside ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot, the upcoming change will allow Gemini users to ask the AI to carry out a task using Adobe software, such as doing simple photo edits.

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VSCO is best known for its mobile editing app with film-inspired presets, but the mobile photo editing powerhouse will soon have its own desktop app for pro-grade photo editing. On Wednesday, June 17, VSCO launched Studio Pro on iOS, with a desktop version of the photo editor set to arrive before the end of the year.

While VSCO Studio Pro is available to download beginning today on iPhone, the app will eventually lead to a desktop photo software by the same name, which VSCO expects to launch for macOS sometime in the fourth quarter of 2026.

The new software comes alongside news that VSCO is working on an all-in-one subscription that mixes editing software with client gallery delivery and online portfolio tools for pros, a result of the company’s acquisition of Tave and subsequent launch of VSCO Workspace.

VSCO Studio Pro carries on several of the tools that VSCO is known for, including its film-inspired presets. But unlike the well-loved VSCO, Studio Pro is designed for editing entire photo shoots.

The new app can edit as many as 100 photos at once using one-tap batch edits based on VSCO’s popular film-inspired presets.

Photographers will also have a handful of traditional tools for adjusting the photograph, such as sliders for exposure, contrast, tone, and white balance. Like the presets, these tools can also be synced across multiple images in batch editing.

The app will also introduce a tool called Style Match, which takes a reference photo – such as one the photographer has edited previously – and matches the new photo to that style.

When editing is finished, photographers will be able to share to VSCO Galleries with one tap.

The original VSCO can work with large numbers of photos by copying and pasting edits or saving recipes, but the new software is designed to move through large sets of images faster, while maintaining visual consistency.

The young software, however, has a handful of notable tools missing, including crops and curves, but has plans to add additional tools down the road.

That list includes tools like aspect ratio, crops, auto leveling, clarity, bloom, halation, and curves. Support for RAW file formats and directly importing from a camera’s SD cards are also forthcoming options, along with the ability to cull photos by assigning each one a star rating.

While the mobile app, as it stands now, feels like a VSCO tailored towards large photo shoots, if the company does add pro must-haves like RAW support, direct memory card import, culling, and advanced editing tools, the new program could eventually become a competitor to key photo editors such as Adobe Lightroom and Capture One.

VSCO says that it is intentionally sharing the iOS app without those features in order to gather early feedback from photographers as it builds up the mobile app and eventually expands the app to desktop devices.

Like the original VSCO, VSCO Studio Pro appears to take on a free-mium price point, allowing users to download and use several tools for free, while a $13 / £13 / AU$20 / CA$18 monthly or $60 / £60 / AU$100 / CA$80 annual subscription unlocks more options. The app is available now for iOS from the App Store.

The VSCO Studio Pro will be part of VSCO’s upcoming suite of tools that packs several commonly used pro tools into one annual subscription. VSCO Studio One will include the editing software as well as VSCO Workspace, a tool for pro photographers to organize and book clients, VSCO Galleries, and AI Lab, among others.

VSCO One will include everything from editing to invoices and galleries to business education resources. Set to launch in late June 2026, VSCO One is expected to have a $499 annual subscription cost. International pricing has not yet been announced, but that converts to about £372 / AU$705 / CA$700.

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Adobe Lightroom can now turn photos into videos using generative AI. The feature, coming as part of a long list in the June 2026 update, gives photographers who forgot to capture video an option to generate B-roll-like footage. However, the tool is only the second Lightroom tool to require generative credits – and the first native Adobe tool in Lightroom to use the credit system.

The update is part of a long list of Creative Cloud June 2026 updates across Lightroom and Photoshop, as well as video tools Premiere and After Effects. Among the photo features, Lightroom’s assisted culling leaves beta, and Photoshop gains the reflection removal tool from Adobe Camera RAW.

Lightroom desktop: generate video from photos

Inside Lightroom on desktop devices, the new Generate Video option will generate an AI video using either Adobe Firefly or Google Veo, using the photo as a starting point. The option is located by navigating to the top menu and selecting Photo, then Generate Video.

That brings up a pop-up that suggests a prompt like “add subtle motion” or “slow pan,” as well as a text field for typing a custom prompt. A drop-down menu allows users to choose from a four, six, or eight-second video.

While Generate Video is far from the first generative AI tool to come to Lightroom, the update is only the second Lightroom feature to use generative credits and the first native Adobe tool to do so. Previously, only the Topaz Gigapixel Generative Upscale used Generative Credits inside Lightroom; Adobe tools like Generative Remove do not currently consume credits in Lightroom.

Some generative credits are included with certain subscriptions, but after that requires purchasing additional credits. The Creative Cloud Photography Plan 20GB includes 100 credits a month, the Lightroom Plan 250, and the 1TB photography plan 1,000 credits a month.

The pop-up generative video box will show creators how many credits the process will consume and what the remaining balance is. That credit amount changes as the different options are adjusted – shorter videos, for example, will consume fewer credits.

Lightroom Classic and Lightroom: Assisted Culling

Lightroom previously gained Assisted Culling, a beta tool that helps photographers weed out the bad shots with tools like checking for focus and ensuring that both eyes are open. Now, that feature is migrating out of Early Access, which is Adobe’s term for a beta feature. The feature is rolling out to both Lightroom and Lightroom Classic.

The Assisted Culling tool will also now recognize faces and give each face a score as to whether or not the eyes are open and sharply focused, a tool designed to help go through photos with more than one person.

The update also offers more filters to give photographers more control over how they want the photos sorted and how strict the culling process is.

The Library module in Lightroom Classic will also allow users to filter photos that use generative AI or need AI settings to be updated, similar to the program’s ability to sort photos by things like shutter speed or what camera took the photo.

Select Subject has improved with a detail slider, which allows creators to refine the masks’ edges to improve accuracy around fine details like hair.

Lightroom updates also include AI sharpening using Topaz Labs’ Noise Aware and support for RAW files from the Sony A7R VI.

Adobe Photoshop: Reflection Removal

Adobe’s reflection removal tool from Adobe Camera RAW is now moving into Photoshop territory. Like the feature in ACR, the AI-based tool detects and removes reflections in photos shot through glass.

Unlike in ACR, Photoshop’s version of Reflection Removal will make the adjustment as a layer, allowing creators to go back and fine-tune later on, which creates a non-destructive edit.

Photoshop’s Remove Tool can now use on-device generative AI, allowing the tool to work without an internet connection.

The updates rolled out on June 15 across Adobe’s photo tools, alongside updates to Premiere, After Effects, and Illustrator.

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If you've been scrolling social media lately, you've probably seen the 'pixel stretch trend' all over your feed. If you don't recognize it by name, this trend does exactly what it suggests: it stretches a slice of pixels from a photograph to create a dynamic sense of motion – and even leading lines.

This isn't the first time the pixel stretch trend has done the rounds on social media. It first surfaced back in 2008, then it appeared again about four years ago. Now it's back a third time, thanks to Gen Z, and if you want to get in on the trend all you need is a photo editor like Photoshop.

It helps to have an image where your subject – specifically its color palette – is distinct from the scenery, as the effect will be far more pronounced than if the subject blends into the background.

The pixel stretch trend works with everything from landscapes to street photography, provided there's a sizeable subject or object to work with. I'm going to use one of my portraits for this example, which I'll edit in Photoshop – but the principles are the same whichever app you're using.

How to do the pixel stretch trend

1) Separate your subject

Use whatever tool does the best job or that you're most comfortable using. Photoshop's Select subject button does a pretty good job, but feel free to go freehand, use the Magnetic Lasso Tool or anything else that gets the job done. Once you've selected your subject, hit Ctrl+J on a PC or Cmd+J to duplicate it as a new layer.

2) Create a pixel strip

On the background layer, use the Rectangular Marquee Tool to create a thin strip down the edge (or close to it, if the edge of your subject is uneven). Then hit Crtl/Cmd +J to duplicate it to a new layer, which should be sitting beneath the subject layer you created in step 1. If you want to, you can repeat this process on the same or different parts of your image.

3) Stretch your strip

Hit Ctrl/Cmd +T to activate Free Transform, which will give you a bounding box with transform points around the strip. Click and hold the middle point and simply drag it to the edge of the image to stretch it out. (You might need to hold the Shift key while you do this, if dragging this point stretches the subject in all directions.)

4) Switch to Warp

For some images – such as those with a flat or geometric subject – a simple, straight pixel stretch might be all you want. But to create dynamism, there's more to the process. While in Free Transform mode, click the icon indicated in the image above to switch into Warp mode. Alternatively, with your stretched pixel layer selected, go to Edit > Transform > Warp.

5) Warp 9, engage!

Now you can get creative! Using the anchor points you can drag, stretch and twist your stretched pixel strip. There are no hard and fast rules here; your shapes can be subtle or spectacular. The only thing to bear in mind is keeping colors or other characteristics in line with their source points on your subject, to support the illusion that its individual pixels are being stretched from their origins.

6) Complementary stretches

If you're adding more than one pixel stretch element, make sure that they complement one another – or, at the very least, that they don't clash. You can use them to create leading lines, to help guide the viewer's eyes around the image, and you can even use the Dodge and Burn Tools to lighten and darken the image to create more depth and dimension. Just experiment and see what works best. Have fun!

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I honestly believe that 1/500 sec is the best shutter speed in photography. There, I said it.

In a world where cameras are now packed with more modes, menus, stabilizers and computational wizardry than ever before, I still think the humble 1/500 sec shutter speed remains the perfect setting for almost everything.

Of course, photography is built on choices. There are times when you need to drag the shutter for movement, times when you want 1/2000 sec for fast sport or wildlife, and times when a tripod and a long exposure are the only answer.

But for everyday photography, the kind that most of us actually shoot day in and day out, I don’t think there is a better balance than a shutter speed of 1/500 sec.

For me, 1/500 sec sits in the perfect middle ground. It is fast enough to freeze most normal movement, whether that is people walking, children playing, street scenes unfolding, animals moving or a subject that simply will not stay still.

It gives you that feeling of control, where you know that the frame is going to be sharp without having to overthink every single movement in front of the lens.

At the same time, this shutter speed does not punish you too heavily when it comes to light. Go much faster and you quickly start starving the sensor, especially if you are working in changing conditions, indoors, under shade or with a slower lens.

But at 1/500 sec, you still let in enough light to keep things sensible. You can usually keep your ISO under control, maintain a good aperture and avoid that slightly desperate feeling of pushing every setting just to make the exposure work.

That is why I think 1/500 sec is the shutter speed that offers the best performance-to-practicality ratio in photography. It gives you the security of speed without the compromises of going too fast. It protects you from camera shake, helps stop subject movement and still enables your lens and sensor to breathe.

For anyone who wants one shutter speed to live on, especially for travel, street, family, documentary, lifestyle and general photography, this is the one.

Modern cameras have made us believe that we need to constantly adjust everything, but sometimes simplicity is the real power move. Set your shutter speed to 1/500 sec, adjust your aperture and ISO around it, and just shoot.

You will spend less time worrying about settings and more time looking for the image, which is exactly where your attention should be.

I know some photographers will disagree. Some will say that 1/250 sec is enough, while others will argue that you should always tailor your shutter speed to the subject.

Technically, they are right. But emotionally, practically and creatively, I still keep coming back to 1/500 sec. It is the shutter speed I trust, the one I rely on and the one I honestly believe most photographers could use for 90% of their everyday shooting.

So yes, while every shutter speed has its place, if I had to choose just one, it would be 1/500 sec every time. It freezes life without killing the light, it keeps images sharp without making the camera work too hard and it gives you the best balance between freedom and control.

For me, that makes it not just a good shutter speed, but the best shutter speed.

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Jordi Koaltic is known for eye-catching visual effects created in camera – but the viral content creator with millions of followers will soon share insight into striking visual effects in a free workshop in New York City and livestreamed online on June 10.

Jordi Koaltic – a collaboration between brothers Jordi and Arnau Puig – is a content creator and photographer team known for simple in-camera creative effects. The brothers share what the camera tricks look like behind the scenes, where they have amassed more than 20 million followers on TikTok and more than seven million followers on Instagram.

The upcoming workshop comes from a partnership between Jordi Koaltic and the US camera retailer Adorama. While Koaltic will collaborate on content, workshops, and podcasts throughout the year, the partnership kicks off with an in-person workshop at Adorama’s flagship store on June 10 from 5 to 6 PM.

Photographers not local to New York can also learn from the viral creator as the event is livestreamed to Adorama’s YouTube channel.

The workshop, Jordi Koaltic Creative Portraits with Light & Motion, will cover how to create simple, repeatable visual effects using in-camera tricks rather than Photoshop or AI editing.

During the one-hour workshop, Koaltic will walk through two creative setups live: one for light painting portraits and one for using screens, glass, and other reflective surfaces to create in-camera effects. Adorama says the workshop is designed for creators who want to create “high-impact imagery without relying on heavy post production, CGI, or AI-generated visuals.”

The event is free, but those wishing to attend are welcome to reserve a spot and find more details on Eventbrite. The workshop will also be livestreamed on YouTube.

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Lightroom Classic’s Lens Blur tool uses AI to achieve something rather remarkable, inferring depth and distance in a two-dimensional image. It’s designed to offer a digital simulation of the kind of shallow depth of field you get from very wide lens apertures.

It’s not just a stylistic decision but a compositional tool, too, because it can help separate subjects from their backgrounds so that they stand out more clearly with fewer distractions.

Early versions of this tool tended to struggle with areas of background seen through holes in the main subject, but as this tool has evolved with successive versions of Lightroom it has become much more capable. Here’s my guide to the main features of the Lens Blur panel, what they do and how they work.

Focus range

This is the central tool in this panel. After Lightroom’s AI analysis, it presents the distance range in the image from closest (left) to farthest (right).

Within that range it displays a bounding box, which Lightroom thinks represents the key subject in the scene. You can accept and work with this as it stands, but you can also drag this box left and right to change the ‘focus distance’ and you can also drag on the left or right handles to adjust the near and far focus distances.

It’s easy to adjust this sharp focus range manually, but it’s not always easy to improve on Lightroom’s initial estimate!

Blur Amount

You can use this slider to adjust the blur in out-of-focus areas, and you might find that you need to keep coming back to this adjustment as you make other changes (to the focus range, for example). It’s easy to get carried away, but it’s important to keep the results realistic.

Blur can backfire if you push it too far! In our sample image, the degree of background blur could easily make the motorcycle look like a model shot from close up

Bokeh shapes

Bokeh is a characteristic of lenses that can be replicated surprisingly well digitally. With this tool, though, the differences between the different bokeh shapes (such as circle, bubble, hexagon, ring, cat eye) are not always easy to see, so it’s up to you how long you want to spend on this.

Bokeh shapes show up most clearly with out-of-focus specular highlights or light sources in the background

Auto / manual subject detection

When you first use the Lens Blur too, Lightroom will attempt to identify the key subject automatically. These days it rarely gets this wrong, but there may be times when you want to shift the focus to a subject or area in the background rather than the foreground, so this is how you do it.

Visualize depth

You can generally see pretty clearly how the Lens Blur tool is focusing and defocusing different parts of the image, but if you need a little help, check this box. It adds a color-coded overlay to the image, which illustrates different distances and defocus amounts with different colors.

Focus and Blur tools

You’ll find these in the ‘Refinement’ section at the bottom of the Lens Blur panel, and you can use them to manually paint in or paint out areas of sharp focus. (Lightroom uses ‘focus’ to mean objects or distances in sharp focus.)

This is all done with a simple manual brush tool, but that’s fine – if you do need to alter the depth mask and subject selection, it’s because the AI hasn’t got it quite right and needs the skill and judgement of the human eye.

Do pay attention to the Size, Feather and Flow sliders. Very often you’ll be trying to blend in the focus adjustment subtly, building up the effect gradually rather than trying to achieve pixel-perfect masking

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While you can file playing marbles at school in the same memory drawer as hopscotch and riding around on your chopper bicycle, they do make a great subject for an abstract macro project. Don’t worry about braving cobwebs and setting off your dust allergy by scrabbling around in the attic looking for them, though.

For some reason they are plentiful and cheap on Amazon, or even some toy shops if you can still find one. The big question is what type to get and why? You can get some with interior swirls and colors, but they can be distracting and less abstract than clear ones.

My suggestion is to look for those devoid of interior design, but ranging from completely transparent to ones with a range of colors. You’ll also need some colored, reflective card and perhaps some additional light to introduce color and highlights and also help with the reflections.

It’s worth starting with the clear marbles first, arranging them on top of your reflective card, with a card at the back to bounce light back into the scene. Unpack your macro lens and focus on one of the marbles at the front of the scene that leads into the rest. You should show some empty space in the foreground because the light reflections will appear there as well.

Setting it up

1. Camera position

It’s a very simple setup because it’s a macro shot, it’s just a case of getting in close enough. The more interesting element is arranging the marbles so that there is a key marble, and that there is space for reflections and others in the background.

2. Key light

This is the main light, which is set to a color temperature of 5600K along with the camera. Yes there’s window light, but it’s not as dominant as this light. I also decided to leave the curtains open, so that the shape of the window was reflected in the marble and because it also registered as more blue in color.

3. Box of marbles

It’s up to you what you use, but marbles without an interior pattern – being clear or colored – give a more interesting, abstract result with better reflections. Try different types, though, to see what you like. It’s also interesting to combine different colors of marbles with the color of the secondary light.

4. The background

For some shots with clear marbles I used this red, reflective card and also set the color of the light on the right to red as well. Then I tried the light with blue. The other combination was to used gold card for a more neutral effect, blue-colored marbles and a blue light to the right.

5. Secondary light

This was here to add highlights and additional reflections. On some of the shots it was red, on others it was blue. With the key light being set to 5600K, that’s why the white balance on the camera was manually set to 5600K to ensure this color registered.

Step by step guide for shooting macro marbles

It’s all about colors, depth of field and the types of reflections and highlights you can create.

01 Setting up for color

If you’re intending to use colored lighting in your photos, then you need to pay attention to the white balance setting on the camera so that it doesn’t attempt to filter it out. The key light was 5600K so, to get the color of the secondary light to register, the camera white balance was set manually to 5600K.

02 Release or timer

After a few shots it became evident that a narrow aperture was going to be the order of the day, which meant a low shutter speed. Even though the camera as on a tripod, it’s safe to either use software or a camera remote to fire the shutter. Or use the self-timer like here, setting it to five seconds, giving enough time for movement to cease.

03 Metering options

As there are some very bright highlights on the marbles from the lighting, one option was to use Highlight Metering to minimize them and then restore the shadows in post. This worked, but I found that I preferred center-weighted metering – which created larger hotspots but, when the focus of the camera was on the surface of the marble, the hotspots became more blurred.

04 Camera settings

In the end I used manual focus because the AF would pick out the reflections, rather than the surface of the marble. I used aperture priority mode so I could cycle through various apertures and upped the ISO to 200 just to lower the chances of camera shake, even with using the timer.

Aperture – How much depth of field do you get?

Well the answer to that on a 105mm macro lens is not very much. At the widest aperture, which worked out at something like f/4.8, there was only a few millimeters of depth of field. If you look at the example, it meant that the edges of the key marble were completely out of focus and the clear marbles in the background virtually disappeared.

A choice of f/11 produced more depth and made the background visible, but still not enough for an entire marble (which was about 10mm in size).

Before you go....

To shoot close ups like this you need a macro lens, some modern LED lighting and a decent tripod.

This lens is my new choice for panoramas. The Canon RF 14mm f/1.4L VCM is a pro-grade, L-series, ultra-wide prime that delivers impressively sharp images without problematic distortion and flare.

Although modern-day zooms are offering better sharpness from corner to corner than ever before, a prime lens like the RF 14mm f/1.4L VCM will always offer unbeatable image quality with sharper results and less distortion (partly thanks to in-camera corrections) compared to a wide zoom that has more moving elements inside.

But as my colleague Matthew said in his Canon RF 14mm f/1.4L VCM review, the expansive view of this lens comes with an expensive price tag – $2,599 / £2,399 / AU$3,799. However, I’m willing to look beyond the cost as this is a very special lens.

It’s one of Canon’s series of VCM hybrid lenses for both stills and video. It's compact and lightweight, yet still offers a fast f/1.4 aperture and is superb for a wide selection of imagery – everything from landscapes to astrophotography to architecture to exteriors and interiors.

It’s the former that’s really made me take notice when using the RF 14mm out in the field, photographing big vistas. I have really enjoyed shooting at such a wide focal length for landscapes and including big skies.

Shooting at apertures of f/8 to f/11 with a 14mm focal length gives you incredible amounts of depth of field, so images are very sharp from foregrounds to backgrounds. But there’s one other big benefit that this super wide-angle prime lens offers: instant landscape panoramas!

I could compose to include a large expansive landscape view, or a large architectural scene like the very broad Royal Crescent in Bath, England, and then just crop the RAW image to 16:9 – or, even better, 21:9 for a proper widescreen panoramic view.

No need to take multiple images and stitch them together in software, just shoot and crop later at 21:9 ratios. Instant panos!

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I’m loving the new Canon RF 45mm f/1.2 STM! It’s lots of fun to shoot with super wide apertures around f/1.2 for everything from creative landscapes with blurry backgrounds, to close-ups of flowers with dreamy blur behind.

The RF 45mm F1.2 STM lens was launched at the same time as the Canon EOS R6 Mark III in November 2025 and “Designed for storytellers looking to elevate their creativity.” They got that right.

Most impressively, however, it offers a much more affordable f/1.2 standard lens than we've ever seen before. Before the RF 45mm F1.2 STM, the super-fast f/1.2 aperture was exclusive to pro prime lenses costing fives times more! For example, the RF 50mm F1.2L USM was launched in 2018 to show off the first EOS R mirrorless camera’s potential. This is a high-quality L-series lens, with the desirable f/1.2 wide aperture, but comes with a high-quality price of $2,599 / £2,589.

The RF 45mm F1.2 STM is obviously it’s not an L-series, and ‘only’ STM, it’s also a budget plastic build (with metal mounts) which all keeps the price down to below $500 / £500.

It’s been a pleasure to spend time shooting with the Canon EOS R6 Mark III and RF 45mm F1.2 STM. The fixed focal length means you need to ‘zoom with your feet’ but this just means you can get closer to your scenes or subjects, open the aperture as wide as you dare, and embrace the blur!

Normally I’d shoot at f/8 or f/11 for a large depth of field so whole landscape scenes are sharp. So it has made a refreshing change to shoot at f/1.2 and f/2 with the Canon RF 45mm f/1.2 STM prime lens for a very shallow depth of field and artistic blur, even in big scenes like this.

The same lens is also awesome and sharp for close-ups, such as these dandelion heads in the two photos below, thanks to its minimum focus distance of only 45cm. Note how much more blur you get at f/1.2 compared to f/2.8. It's easy to forget that f/1.2 is more than 2-stops wider than f/2.8!

This means it's allows more than five times more light into the lens, which is why these fast lenses are great for shooting in low light conditions as you can get fast shutter speeds to shoot handheld without worry.

It’s Canon’s first f/1.2 aperture non-professional RF lens, weighing under 350g and at a great price point, it’s a very attractive and affordable lens.

It’s also the ideal lens to take more creative photos by utilising the wide apertures to capture a very shallow depth of field, with lots of lovely blur and bokeh!

Thanks to the EOS R6 Mark III’s AI AF, it’s easier than ever to get your focusing spot on, which is crucial when working with such a thin slither of sharpness at around f/1.2.

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Color Grading is widely used in video editing to create a consistent look across a series of clips, but it’s now common to find color grading tools in photo editors too, like here in Lightroom Classic. Color grading works by splitting the image up into three tonal regions – shadows, midtones and highlights – and then adjusting the hue, saturation and luminance values for each to produce a range of cinematic or atmospheric effects.

Color grading is carried out using individual ‘color wheels’ for the shadow, midtone and highlight regions, and quick and intuitive control points for adjusting the color shift. It might look complex but it’s actually quite easy to do, and if you create a color grade you like that you want to re-use in the future, you can save it as a preset. Many Lightroom presets are based around these color grading tools.

3-way adjustment

You choose how the color wheels are displayed and adjusted using this set of buttons running across the top of the Color Grading panel. In the 3-way adjustment mode currently selected, you can see and adjust all three color wheels at once – the one you’re currently adjusting is highlighted while the others are greyed out.

This is a quick and simple way to work if you already have an idea how you want the image to look and you need to adjust shadows, midtones and highlights to get it.

Shadows, midtones, highlights

You can use these buttons to adjust the shadows, midtones and highlights color wheels individually. This is useful if the effects you want to achieve uses only one of these tonal ranges, which is not uncommon.

You can use the shadows color wheel to add a deep, rich color to the darker tones

Adjusting the midtones only will preserve neutral shadows and highlights

Global adjustment

You might just want to apply an overall color shift, and the global adjustment option is the way to do it. It’s also the simplest way to add a color grade to a photo.

Color wheel

This is the heart of Lightroom’s color grading tools, and it uses a draggable control point to adjust hue and saturation. Initially, this will be at the center (neutral) position in the color wheel, and you then drag it towards the edge in the direction of the color you want to apply. You can drag the control point around the wheel, not just outwards. The further you drag it towards the edge, the stronger the saturation of the color tint.

Hue control

You’ll see another control point on the outside of the color wheel showing the hue you’ve selected. You can move this control point around the outside of the color wheel to change the hue. It might look as if it’s doing the same job as the main control point, but in fact it adjust the hue only, not the saturation, and it allows much more precise control – especially when the main control point is very close to the center and small movements have big effects.

Luminance slider

The control wheel only allows you to adjust hue and saturation, but the luminance sliders let you change the brightness of the shadows, midtones and highlights too.

Try reducing the luminance for the shadows to make them richer and deeper

Increasing shadow luminance can create an attractive vintage ‘matte’ effect

Blending

BLENDINGIf you are using different color values for the shadows, midtones and highlights, they blend together progressively for a natural-looking color transition. This slider lets you adjust this blending effect to be more abrupt and pronounced or smoother and less visible.

Blending adjustments can be quite subtle but they are still worth experimenting with

Balance

Normally, your shadows, midtones and highlights adjustments will get an ‘equal share’ of the tonal range, but you can use the balance slider to push the effect of your shadow adjustment further into the tonal range, for example, or bring your highlight adjustment further down into the midtones.

The balance slider make quite a difference to the way an image looks, but also introduces another variable that complicates things – you might find it simpler just to tweak the look with the color wheels

Lightroom Classic’s Distraction Removal panel can easily get overlooked. But rather than spend time manually cloning out dust spots or unwanted passers-by with the cloning and healing tools or AI Remove tool, take a look at the Distraction Removal panel first.

It uses AI to automate tasks you might previously have done manually – so no more brushing, no more object selection, just one-click fixes for three common photo-editing scenarios.

Remove mode

This is the mode you need for any image retouching or object removal jobs in Lightroom. The top panel, just called ‘Remove’, is where you’ll find the regular Heal, Clone and AI Remove tools.

The Heal tool has always been useful for blotting out sensor spots, while the Clone tool is still best for pinpoint image repairs where you need to copy nearby details under full control over the size of the repair, the source area and the brush properties.

Distraction Removal

This is the second panel in the Remove mode and it has three sections: Reflections, People and Dust. These are normally collapsed, so if you select one the others shrink back to just the title, but we’re showing them all open here.

Between them, these three Distraction Removal options cover a lot of the everyday retouching scenarios that photographers are faced with.

Reflections

Have you ever photographed a display through a shop window or display case but had the picture ruined by reflections? This tool will automatically find any reflections in your photo – no need for any manual masking – and will subdue the reflection while magically revealing the objects behind the glass.

Like many of Adobe’s AI tools, this sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t – but when it does, it’s like magic

People

This tool tackles a problem faced by every travel or architectural photographer: the scene is filled with passers-by. It would take an age to remove everyone in this shot manually and there are few ‘clean’ areas to clone from – but the ‘People’ Distraction Removal tool does an amazing job, identifying practically every figure then removing them almost invisibly.

This is another tool where you just have to try it and see. I have another shot of the same scene from a slightly different angle where it didn’t work well at all, mainly because it couldn’t figure out complex stepped railings and other irregular objects in the background.

People masking

As soon as you open the People panel, Lightroom will scan the image for people and highlight them with a red mask overlay. All you need to now is hit the Remove button and Lightroom will erase all these people from the scene.

Don’t worry if the mask doesn’t follow the outline of people closely – it’s using surrounding regions, not just the figures themselves.

Keeping people in

The People tool will highlight people and groups of people with a red mask overlay – but very often this is not one mask but several, so that you may see a series of mask ‘pins’ dotted around the image. You can select these individually and delete them if you want to keep these people or groups of people in the scene.

If you are selecting some people for removal and others to keep in, it’s probably going to be easier to use the regular tools in the Remove panel.

Dust

The Reflections and People tools are attempting to achieve complex adjustments that sometimes work well and sometimes don’t. The Dust tool, though, is so effective that you can forget about manually blotting out sensor spots and use this instead. It will even show you spots you hadn’t seen with the naked eye.

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Lightroom Classic’s masking tools use a combination of AI subject recognition and regular brush and gradient tools to offer huge scope for local adjustments and enhancements. But you can get even more control by using masks in combination – in other words, with ‘sub-masks’.

There are many situations where this can be useful, but our sample image shows a very common one – where you want to darken a sky progressively towards the horizon but without darkening any buildings or other objects that jut up into the sky.

In our example, a linear gradient produces the right gradual darkening but would also darken the building. A sky mask would darken the whole sky, right down to the horizon without any natural gradation in tone.

But by ‘intersecting’ a sky mask and a linear gradient, we can get a gradual tonal gradation that affects only the sky. Our cheat sheet shows the location of the key Lightroom Classic masking controls.

Masking mode

To create and edit masks in Lightroom Classic you need to swap to the masking mode. This panel will give you a list of mask types to choose from. When you choose one, it appears in the Masks panel which opens out to the left of the tools sidebar.

Main mask

The Masks panel will show the area affected by your mask as a tiny thumbnail. Each new mask you add to your photo will appear as a new thumbnail. Any or all of these masks can include sub-masks.

Sub-masks

Every mask will have at least one sub-mask. If you’ve just used a single masking tool it will still appear here. Sub-masks become important if you want to combine or edit the masks that Lightroom has created.

Sky mask

To demonstrate this powerful ‘intersect’ command we’ve started off with a sky mask and used the adjustment tools in the right sidebar to darken it. This produced a very ‘flat’ adjustment that didn’t look natural. This is a common issue with sky masks if they are used on their own.

Sky masks identify sky areas very well but don’t offer any natural gradation towards the horizon.

Linear mask 'intersected'

The ideal way to darken a sky progressively is with a linear mask, but these are indiscriminate in that they darken everything at the top of the frame whether it’s actually part of the sky or not.

This is where an ‘intersected’ sky mask and linear mask can achieve what’s needed – a progressive darkening of the sky with other objects in the foreground left untouched. The linear mask achieves the gradual tonal adjustment, while the sky mask restricts it to the sky alone.

Gradient sub-masks remain editable, e.g. you can move them around even if they’ve been ‘intersected’, added or subtracted from the mask.

Add/Subtract buttons

The Masks panel can look pretty busy, especially if you have all your masks expanded to show sub-masks too – so how do the Add/Subtract buttons fit in? In fact, they apply to the main mask you’ve selected. When you use them, they add new sub-masks. They do not apply to sub-masks.

Adjustment tools

Keep in mind that Lightroom’s local adjustment tools apply to the main mask. Any sub-masks you create simply change the area covered by the mask. These sub-masks do not have their own adjustments. If you need to create a new set of adjustments for a different part of the image then you will need a new mask.

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Exposure is the single most important factor in photography – followed closely by composition. I mean, you can line up the greatest composition in the world, but if you’ve under or overexposed the image beyond saving, that composition means nothing. This is precisely why I don’t get the overbearing – dare I say sycophantic – obsession with manual exposure.

I will hold my hands up and say that the photography press has perpetuated the myth that ‘going manual’ is somehow a serious photographer’s right of passage. And goodness knows, the way it gets talked about, you’d think by flicking the switch you’d immediately ascend, be blessed by the photography greats, and return to Earth as a walking-talking light meter.

The manual myth

But here’s what nobody is telling you; the act of simply switching to manual mode will not improve your photography. If you’re not prepared, it’ll make it worse. If you switch to manual exposure and haven’t mastered both the exposure triangle and your camera’s controls, you will only increase your chances of underexposing or overexposing your images. And that’s when you’re not completely missing the moment because you’re inadvertently thumbing the aperture command wheel, when you should have been thumbing the shutter speed command wheel, or you were attempting to widen the aperture only to accidentally narrow it.

You wouldn’t promote a karting champion straight to F1, so if your camera is perpetually set on auto, the last thing you want to be doing is switching to manual mode because the internet told you to. And don’t give me: “Well, in the film days it was all manual and we just had to deal with it,” because there’s a reason the Canon AE-1 was so popular and that reason was shutter priority.

Priority modes

If you don’t know what a priority mode is, think of it as manual mode light. Most cameras nowadays have two priority modes: shutter priority and aperture priority. The former allows you to directly control the shutter speed, leaving the camera to automatically set the aperture and the latter allows you to directly control the aperture, leaving the camera to automatically set the shutter speed. In both instances, you can choose to allow the camera to automatically set the ISO or control it manually.

The beauty of these priority modes is that they allow you to retain your creative agency. Need to control the depth of field? Aperture priority allows you to do that. Want to freeze fast action? Select shutter priority. And should the camera adjust the opposing setting as far as possible, you can alter the ISO or adjust your chosen priority setting to compensate.

Plenty of professional photographers rely on priority modes. Especially those working in environments where they need to react quickly. But they are also the perfect jumping-off point for photographers looking to breach the confines of auto mode or P modes, without completely loosening the reins.

Am I saying that you shouldn’t use manual exposure mode? Absolutely not. Manual exposure is still the only way to maintain complete control over your settings and in the hands of a skilled photographer, it’s unmatched. It’s also the preferred setting for disciplines such as landscapes and architecture, where you can generally take the time to tweak your settings without fear of missing the moment.

Just don’t get caught up in the manual mode hype. Free yourself from the confines of auto mode by selecting a priority mode. Manual mode will come, when you’re ready.

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Earlier this year I wrote about the development of a rather unusual camera accessory claiming to be the world’s first light-meter integrated watch and from today, Increment Labs’ LMW-V1: Light Meter Watch Kickstarter is officially live. Billed as “the first purpose-made watch for photographers,” and “the only watch to feature an integrated light meter,” the Light Meter Watch is designed to take the guessing game away from film photography.

But before I talk more about this product’s concept, I think it’s important to note that I haven’t seen or tried it in the flesh. And, as with all Kickstarters, there is a degree of risk involved for backers because you are buying into an untested product. That said, Kickstarter is a fantastic platform for allowing start-up ideas to become a reality and it was made for a small project like this.

Back to the product itself. I’d actually argue that a light-meter watch concept is more relevant now than ever before. That might seem like an odd statement, what with the heyday of film long behind us, but the recent film resurgence came at a time when very few film cameras were still being made. Beyond the Pentax 17 and Kodak Ektar H35/H35N, new film cameras are still hard to come by.

Because of this, many film photographers are turning to vintage film cameras to get their analog fix. This is relevant because not all vintage cameras have built-in light meters and it’s not uncommon for those that do to feature light meters that either do not work or have degraded over time. The light meter then – which was pretty much extinct outside of professional photo studios – has had a little bit of a resurgence. What better time to wear one on your wrist?

One burning question I had originally was whether the light meter would meter reflective or incident lighting (or both). It’s since been confirmed that the Light Meter Watch will measure reflective light (at a 45-degree angle) only and while it would have been nice to have the two options, I think this makes a lot of sense. Reflective metering measures the light bouncing off a subject, while incident metering measures the light falling onto the subject.

The former is measured from the camera’s shooting position, while the latter is measured right by the subject and angled towards the light source. While an incident reading is more accurate, a reflective reading is more practical. And indeed, a camera’s built-in light meter is reflective and for an accessory that’s designed for photographers out and about with their film camera, this is by far the more useful of the two.

Already, the LMW-V1: Light Meter Watch’s goal of £28,875 is well over 2/3 of the way to completion, with just over £23,000 pledged at the time of writing. The goal must be reached by June 4, 11:22 am (BST) for the project to be successfully funded. There are four rewards to choose from. A total of 800 backers will be able to take advantage of the Super Early Bird (300 units) and Early Bird (500 units). These both come with the LMW-V1 and a rubber strap for £119 and £129, totalling 36% and 30% off the £185 MSRP, respectively.

What’s proving most popular at the time of writing is the Limited Edition: Black LMW-V1 (300 units exclusive to Kickstarter) priced at £143. The biggest saving is achieved when ordering the LMW-V1 Bundle (300 units), which includes both the standard and Black LMW-V1, along with a Milanese strap and a black leather strap.

No matter the reward, you can also select from optional add-ons, whereby you can upgrade the watch’s body to stainless steel, order a travel case, and choose from a range of straps. Should the Kickstarter prove successful, shipping is expected to start in Q1 of 2027.

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There is something wonderfully sobering about hearing a great photographer speak honestly about the craft.

Not in the polished language of camera launches, exhibition notes, or carefully written monographs, but in the plain, almost brutal truth of someone who has spent a lifetime chasing pictures.

In a recent interview with Leica, street photographer Matt Stuart said something that has stayed with me: “I have one second worth of success in photography, maybe 500 max good pictures.”

You can watch the full interview below:

That line stopped me in my tracks, because if someone like Matt Stuart, one of the finest observers of everyday life with a camera, can reduce his entire photographic success to a handful of moments, then what chance do the rest of us have? Or perhaps more importantly, why are we all holding ourselves to such impossible standards?

As photographers, we are constantly surrounded by greatness. We look at the work of Matt Stuart, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Vivian Maier, Robert Frank, Elliott Erwitt, Joel Meyerowitz, and all the other giants of the medium, and we see only the finished frame.

We see the decisive moment, the perfect composition, the humour, the sadness, the poetry, the split-second geometry of life arranged in a way that feels almost impossible.

What we do not see is the missed shot, the badly timed frame, the wrong exposure, the days where nothing happens, the rolls of film or memory cards filled with photographs that are, to put it kindly, nothing special.

And yet we compare ourselves to the masterpiece, not the process.

That, I think, is where so much of the damage happens. We look at a photographer’s life’s work and judge our Tuesday afternoon walk against it. We take a camera out for an hour, come back with nothing gallery-worthy, and somehow convince ourselves that we have failed.

I have done this more times than I care to admit. I have walked with a Leica around my neck, hoping that the world might offer me something worthy of a wall, a book, a gallery, or, at the very least, something that makes me feel like I am getting closer to the photographers I admire. More often than not, I come home with a handful of frames that are fine, maybe even good, but not quite the thing I had imagined.

And that is the trouble with photography. The picture in your head is often far better than the one on the contact sheet or screen.

Henri Cartier-Bresson is often quoted as saying that you are lucky if you take one or two good pictures a year. That sounds almost ridiculous in an age where we can shoot thousands of images in a weekend, edit them instantly, share them immediately, and receive some kind of response within minutes.

But perhaps he was right. Perhaps the real measure of photography is not how many frames we make, but how rarely the truly great ones arrive. The photograph that stays with people. The photograph that does not need explanation. The photograph that seems to contain more than the thing it depicts.

Because the more I think about it, the more I believe photography is not just about skill. Skill matters, of course. You need to understand light, timing, composition, exposure, distance, gesture and instinct. You need to know your camera so well that it becomes almost invisible in your hands. But after all of that, there is still something else. Something out of your control. Something that happens in front of you for a fraction of a second and then disappears forever.

Luck is a word photographers often dislike because it sounds as though it diminishes the craft. But I do not think it does. Luck only rewards the person who is there, watching, waiting, and ready.

The great photographers are not great because they are lucky once; they are great because they keep turning up in the hope that luck might pass by again. They place themselves in the path of possibility. They develop an eye sharp enough to recognise the extraordinary inside the ordinary.

That is where I think we, especially those still trying to find our voice, can be far too hard on ourselves. We expect every outing to produce something meaningful. We judge our work against books, exhibitions, and legendary names, forgetting that even the masters spent most of their time failing. Beautifully failing, perhaps, but failing all the same. Photography is built on failure. It is a lifelong exercise in nearly, almost, not quite, and try again.

I feel that deeply in my own work. I want, as I think many photographers do, to make images that feel worthy of being seen beyond the screen. I want to create photographs that could sit on a gallery wall and not feel out of place. I want to make work that says something, even quietly, about life, people, place, or time. But that desire can become a burden if I let it. It can make every frame feel like a judgment. It can turn the joy of looking into the pressure of producing.

And photography, at its best, should begin with joy. The joy of seeing. The joy of wandering. The joy of noticing a small human moment that most people would walk past without a second thought.

Not every photograph has to be great. In fact, most photographs will not be great. That does not make them worthless. They are practicing. They are visual notes. They are proof that you were looking.

Perhaps that is the lesson hidden inside Matt Stuart’s wonderfully honest remark. Maybe success in photography really does add up to seconds. Maybe a lifetime of work is not thousands of perfect images, but a tiny collection of moments where everything aligned. The right light, the right subject, the right gesture, the right photographer in the right place at the right time. And if that is true, then perhaps the standard is not unachievable after all. Perhaps we have simply misunderstood what the standard is.

The aim is not to make a masterpiece every time we pick up a camera. The aim is to keep looking, keep learning, keep failing, and keep being ready for the one second when the world arranges itself in front of us.

That thought is oddly freeing. It reminds me that I do not need to measure every frame against the masters. I can admire them, learn from them, be inspired by them, but I do not need to punish myself for not being them.

Their greatness was not instant, constant, or effortless. It was built through years of walking, waiting, missing, doubting, and occasionally, just occasionally, finding the frame.

So perhaps we should all be a little kinder to ourselves. Perhaps up-and-coming photographers, professionals, enthusiasts, and anyone chasing that elusive “good picture” should remember that the greats were not great every day.

They were simply devoted enough to keep going until the good pictures found them!.

And maybe, if we are lucky, if we keep our eyes open and our cameras ready, we might get our own one second of success too.

Should you edit your photos? Yes or no? How long is a piece of string… What I’m trying to say is that there really is no single right answer. It all comes down to what you want to achieve with your images.

As someone who hates being in front of a computer, and who, for the most part, dislikes the highly unnatural extent to which many photographers edit their photos these days, I always lean toward minimal editing when it comes to non-professional work.

But as someone who also uses photography in a professional capacity – and wants that work to look professional – I’m willing to slog through hours of touching up in Lightroom.

I don’t particularly enjoy editing; in fact, I’d go as far as to say I truly dislike being in front of a computer, regardless of the task. But I want to ensure my clients see why they paid me instead of taking the photos themselves.

The great thing about taking pictures for yourself is that you set the creative vision and the standard your photos must meet. Don’t feel like burning your eyes out comparing 10 versions of the same frame? Then don’t do it.

I think a lot of photographers forget this, especially as posting on social media puts your images out to the whole world, which can make it feel like a global audience of photography experts is judging them.

In fact, if you truly hate editing – which I’m sure many photographers do – then why not build your identity around “no-edit” photography? You could probably build a following online with other “lazy” photographers who just want to bask in the strength of their compositions without worrying about color theory or fiddling with sliders in post-production.

Who knows, if you stick with it long enough and develop a strong eye for composition, your “straight out of camera” work might even attract clients.

Although, take that with a pinch of salt. 99% of the time, the way to gain traction as a professional photographer is through editing. Making the leap from amateur to professional requires a good eye for composition, regardless, but in the internet age, most viewers probably care more about the final edit than the scene itself.

Going back to my earlier gripe about the flood of overly edited images we now see, these have unfortunately set a kind of new photographic standard. So as much as I hate to say it, you’d better get good at making your photos “pop” if you want to earn a living with your camera today.

But it’s not just about adjusting hues to “harmonize” the color palette and then boosting contrast and saturation. Editing is a skill developed over time, and there’s a big difference between a well-edited image and an overcooked 16:9 mess.

As for avoiding the slog of editing, I’m not sure there’s a shortcut to developing your skills. Like any ability, it requires repetition, which comes with spending time in your post-production software.

However, I’m not against using AI to save time by applying edits in bulk. A lot of people disagree with this and, from an environmental perspective, I understand why. But there’s no denying that the biggest downside to editing is that it involves so much repetitive, admin-like work, which AI can handle with a few clicks.

In my view, as long as you don’t outsource creative control to AI and only use it to apply a vision you’ve developed yourself, there’s no issue with tools that help batch your editing style. If the AI isn’t doing anything you wouldn’t have done manually, then you’re just saving time—and possibly making the process more enjoyable. At least for me it does.

So, should you edit your photos? If it brings you pleasure or you’re aiming to become a professional, then absolutely. But if you don’t enjoy it and no one’s judging your pictures, then why bother? It doesn’t make you any less of a photographer—it just means you might never be seen as a serious one.

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Tone Curve adjustments are a very powerful way to modify the tonal range and contrast of your photos. The basic principle is simple – you drag on the curve to change its shape to alter the brightness of different tonal regions, from the shadows on the left to the highlights on the right. However, Lightroom Classic’s Tone Curve panel has hidden depths which are easily overlooked but make it a much more powerful and intuitive tool. Here’s a guide to the key features…

Parametric Curve

This is an alternative way to make curves adjustments. Instead of dragging control points directly on the curve, which can sometimes be a bit imprecise, here you get sliders for the Highlights, Lights, Darks and Shadows so that you can adjust these tonal regions individually. Adjustments made with one slider will ‘push’ slightly into the others in order to maintain a smooth tone curve.

• Try boosting the Lights slider to add brightness and sparkle to flat looking images
• Try reducing the Shadows slider to add depth and contrast to an image

Adjust tool

Click on this tool to activate it, then click and drag up or down on any area or object in the image to adjust its tone value – you’ll see this reflected in the tone curve. This is a good way to target specific tonal values and objects only.

• You can use this tool to increase the contrast between two similar tonal values. Click and drag on one area to lighten it then click on the other and drag down to darken it

White point and black point

You can drag the white point to the left if the image histogram doesn’t quite stretch to the right-hand side and you can drag the black point slider to the right to meet the left edge of the histogram. Lightroom Classic does not have a separate levels adjustment, but this does the same job.

• For a faded analog ‘matte’ look you can drag the black point slider upwards so that the darkest tones in the image don’t quite go to a solid black

RGB color curves

Normally you would work with the combined curves adjustments to adjust all three color channels in the image at the same time. However, you can also edit the red, green and blue color channels individually to create a huge range of color shifts and effects.

• Using RGB curves to adjust colors can get confusing. Try the Color Grading panel instead!
• If you want adjust individual colors, you need the Color Mixer panel, especially its Point Color mode

Curve shape

To change the shape of the curve, just drag on the line or click to add a control point which you can then move around to reshape the curve. You can add as many points as you like but things can quickly get messy, so try to keep it simple.

• A classic ’S-shape’ curve will add midtone contrast to a photo without clipping the shadows or highlights. Use on control point to lower the darker tones and another to raise the lighter tones

Curve presets

This little drop-down menu is easy to miss but very useful if you find yourself making the same curve adjustments again and again.

• To save a curve preset, make your curve adjustments first and note the menu now shows ‘Custom’. Open the menu, choose the Save option at the bottom and name your new preset.

Lightroom Classic has powerful options for black and white photographers, even without delving into the masking tools for dodging and burning. Unlike color photography, where you can often use image straight from the camera, black and white relies on a little extra work in the digital darkroom. Images shot in black and white modes on the camera typically benefit from some careful contrast, clarity and color mixing adjustments to really bring them to life. So here are some key tools in Lightroom Classic to help achieve that monochrome mastery.

B&W button

This simple button at the top of the Basic panel switches the Develop tools from regular color editing to monochrome. The key difference is that what would normally be the Color Grading panel now swaps to the B&W panel, where you can apply the same color mixing tools to your black and white images that feature in Photoshop’s Channel Mixer and B&W adjustment layers.

• You could convert color images to black and white simply by reducing the Saturation value to zero, but B&W mode is designed specifically for this kind of work

B&W panel

This displays eight different color ranges which you can adjust and ‘mix’ to create your black and white conversion. When you reduce the value of a color it comes out darker in the black and white image; when you increase the value, it comes out lighter. To make blue skies darker and foliage lighter in landscape shots, for example, you would reduce the Blue value and increase the Green.

• If you apply larger adjustments, trying shifting adjacent color sliders slightly in the same direction to blend in the adjustment more subtly
• Look out for edge effects around objects if you apply too strong an adjustment to darken blue skies, for example
• The Adjust gadget can save you a lot of time. Just select it then drag up and down on areas of the image to darken or lighten those colors

Tone adjustments

These work in the normal way, but you’ll find you can often push the Contrast and other values further than you would with color images. Black and white is more forgiving of extreme adjustments, which can often add to the graphic impact.

• By all means use the histogram display at the top to check for clipping, but you can often afford to lose more highlight and shadow detail than you can with color

Presence sliders

The Presence sliders need to be used with a little care when you’re working on color images, but in black and white you can afford to go wild. As a medium it’s already more dramatic and theatrical than color, and the Texture, Clarity and Dehaze sliders can really add to the impact of an image.

• The Texture slider is good for adding micro-contrast to details in the image
• Use the Clarity slider to make objects really stand out and give a lift to flat-looking images
• The Dehaze slider adds drama to skies and gives darker tones a lift too. In color it can often add too much color saturation, but in black and white that’s not a problem!

Profiles

It’s easy to overlook the Profiles in Lightroom Classic, and while the default Adobe Color and Adobe Monochrome profiles will do a decent job, it’s definitely worth clicking the Browse button to look through all the other profiles available. Lightroom comes with a selection of bespoke B&W Profiles which all deliver a unique ‘look’

• These profiles are not like presets. They are like a kind of pre-processing step that doesn’t involve the editing tools at all

Effects panel

The Effects panel has two great tools for black and white photographers. The Post Crop Vignetting tool adds subtle corner shading to increase the contrast in your photos and add a framing effect to aid the composition, while the Grain effect offers a very realistic simulation of actual analog film grain.

• You can get into the nitty gritty of the Grain Size and Roughness sliders if you like, but for quick and convincing results you can leave them at their defaults and just use the Amount slider

If you have a large or even a more modest Lightroom Classic catalog, you’re probably aware of how difficult it can sometimes be to find specific photos. This is a problem Excire Search 2026 aims to solve with AI-powered image search, while also offering time-saving photo-culling capabilities to help you edit shoots more quickly than before.

This probably all sounds too good to be true, and it may be, but you’ll have to read on to find out. What I can say at this point is that my interest was certainly piqued when I discovered the capabilities of this plugin. Like most things in life, it’s not perfect, but it may have the capabilities to aid your workflow if you can justify the cost.

Excire Search 2026 is a Lightroom Classic plugin developed by the German company Excire. It uses local artificial intelligence to analyse the content of your images, building a searchable database that’s on your computer and not in the cloud. This means your data isn’t shared, and no data centers are required for data processing.

In a nutshell, software features include intelligent search, automatic organization and AI-assisted culling. It's available with a perpetual license, so no annoying subscriptions.

Excire Search 2026: System requirements

Excire Search 2026: Price

Excire Search 2026 is the latest version of the software and can be purchased directly on the Excire website. The plugin costs $229 / £199, so it’s not cheap considering the cost of some other Lightroom Classic plugins that are available, but this is a perpetual license; once you have it, you don’t have to worry about ongoing costs.

With this in mind, it’s useful that there’s a 14-day free trial available, so you can try before you buy to be sure that Excire Search 2026 is going to be useful for you. If you struggle to find photos and spend a lot of time manually culling photos after shoots, it could be just what you need.

Excire Search 2026: Key Features

Excire Search 2026 is an AI-powered plugin for Adobe Lightroom Classic that significantly enhances how photographers and videographers manage and search their photo catalog. Designed for both professionals and enthusiasts, it integrates directly into Lightroom for a seamless workflow.

Under the hood, the software uses advanced AI to analyze image and video content automatically. It recognises faces, objects, scenes, colors, lighting conditions, emotions and movement, allowing users to perform intuitive searches.

Six search modes underpin this capability, including prompt-based text search, similarity search, people and face search and keyword search without having to manually tag photos beforehand. Excire Search 2026 can also find videos, which is useful, but Lightroom isn’t the best software for video because it can’t read footage captured in Log color profiles.

Further to not needing to manually tag photos, Excire can automate keyword tagging directly into Lightroom’s catalog, identifying duplicates and near-duplicates, and enabling deep filtering by both content and metadata. This makes navigating even large photo libraries fast and efficient, which eliminates time-consuming manual sorting.

An impressive and useful feature in the 2026 version is AI-assisted culling. This tool is designed to reduce the time spent reviewing images after shoots. It groups images by scene, people or capture sequence, then evaluates them using criteria such as sharpness, facial expression, and overall aesthetics. Face sharpness detection allows quick technical checks, while best-shot detection highlights the strongest images instantly. You, of course, maintain control over which photos are ultimately deleted.

Excire Search 2026: Interface, usability & performance

Once installed, you have to initialize your Lightroom Classic catalog so Excire Search 2026 has all of your photos loaded in to allow it to do its job. I initialized a catalog of over 70,000 photos, which took several hours to complete.

You also have to initialize your photos every time you import more to the catalogue, but you only have to initialize the most recently imported photos, not the entire catalogue. Initialization is simply loading photos into the plugin, but it would be much better if initialization were automatic.

The user interface is easy to use and can be set to a couple of sizes, as well as being minimized to just a small panel that can sit out of the way. It’s this panel that allows you to access the different features offered by Excire Search 2026. The plugin is overall easy to use, but the photo culling feature is slightly more complicated, so taking advantage of video tutorials is useful.

The plugin works locally with no connection to data centers, making it GDPR-compliant. All processing takes place on your computer. The speed at which Excire Search 2026 performs searches is impressive, especially when considering how many images are in the catalog I was using for testing.

Search results were impressive, but when searching for specific photos I know are in the catalogue, it sometimes pulled up similar options but not the exact photo I was aiming for. Overall, the search functionality is impressive, but it’s not always perfect. Excire Search 2026 does, however, save a huge amount of time when searching for photos.

Excire Search 2026: Verdict

Excire search is a fantastic plugin that makes finding images in large Lightroom Classic catalogs easier than without. It’s not always perfect and can miss some photos, but the locally running artificial intelligence does a pretty good job overall. The software is generally easy to use, and there are lots of tutorial videos available on Excire’s YouTube channel if you need any help.

It’s not the cheapest Lightroom plugin available, but it is a perpetual license. One slightly annoying aspect of the plugin is that you have to re-initialize your photos every time you import more photos into the catalog. It’s not the end of the world, but it would be better if Excire could do this automatically. On the plus side here, you only have to initialize the images freshly installed, not the entire catalogue again.

I’m a massive fan of the black-and-white landscape photography that helped bring the artistic genre into the mainstream, especially from the likes of Ansel Adams. His black-and-white work truly embodies the phrase “composition is king,” and I think the lack of color makes you hone in on this.

But there's another historic photographer whose name is less well-known that I think more landscape photographers should know: Galen Rowell.

Sometimes, even the black-and-white works of the great Adams leave me wanting more. It’s certainly not related to the way his images are composed. In fact, I’ve spent hours studying his frames, as I think every landscape photographer who takes the craft seriously should.

But for photographers like myself who wish they could see those same striking scenes in color, I think you'll find inspiration in the work of Galen Rowell.

Rowell (1940-2002) was a landscape photographer who published in major outdoor magazines, most notably National Geographic, and his excellent color stills inspire a real sense of adventure. While I absolutely love looking at Adams’ work, it just doesn’t feel as immersive as when I admire Rowell’s.

For me, landscape photography is all about depicting the raw beauty of nature, and black-and-white photography just doesn’t do this to the same extent as color.

Granted, things like textures, leading lines, and layers in the scene are probably even better pronounced in black and white, but color images give me a sense of how it would feel to be standing where the photographer was.

I’m not saying Rowell composed better images than Adams. On the contrary, Rowell was greatly inspired by Adams, even being dubbed the “35mm Ansel Adams.”

Rowell’s landscape photography, which often featured mountains, was seen by some as a modern evolution of Adams’ traditional monochrome approach. Born nearly 40 years after Adams, Rowell's gear of choice was typically a portable 35mm SLR, like the Nikon F5. "Ninety percent of my best life's work could have been made with a manual body, a 24mm lens, and a telephoto zoom in the 80-200mm range," he once wrote.

Interestingly, there are at least 3,500 color stills that Adams created, mostly on commercial assignments throughout the 1940s and 1950s, primarily with Kodachrome. However, he often found the process lacked the creative control and precision of black and white, calling it an “out-of-tune piano.”

Adams’ color photos aren’t that easy to come by, as the originals weren’t published until 1993, when a small selection was included in that year’s edition of his book, Ansel Adams in Color, which you can still buy. Of course, you can find digitally remastered color versions of his famous black-and-white shots all over the internet.

I find it fascinating that Adams saw color photography as a frustration rather than the gift it has been in enabling such rich and emotionally inspiring landscape photography. I wonder if he would’ve felt the same had he discovered photography in the digital age, when color was already the standard and black and white a niche.

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Instagram’s new “flash look” filter quickly went viral on social media – but not without its controversy. The new filter quickly went viral for the retro look, but some users reported the AI-generated filter drastically changed their face and even ethnicity.

The viral Instagram flash filter mimicked the retro flash look with harsh shadows and film-like colors. The filter briefly disappeared from the app's options but has since returned.

The filter isn't among the usual carousel of Instagram filters. Instead, the viral Instagram flash filter was a “Create with AI” option located inside Stories and Effects that uses AI to re-generate the photo with the popular retro look.

While the filter quickly went viral, some users reported that the tool appeared to change ethnicity . I tried it out myself, and it certainly created a retro look, but it also changed my eye color from blue to green, serving as a reminder of one of the pitfalls of using generative AI.

The Instagram flash filter went viral for all the wrong reasons – while some loved the look, others realized the shortcomings of AI-generated imagery, including portraits that no longer looked like the person in the photograph.

But here’s the thing – I’m a photographer, and I think the retro flash look is actually one of the easiest flash effects to create, even if all you have is a smartphone. While using flash to mimic natural light or create dramatic portraits takes time, practice, and expensive lighting set-ups, the direct flash look is as simple as just turning the built-in flash on.

The look that the viral Instagram filter comes from is based on the look of 35mm film compact cameras, which were consumer cameras and not complicated options geared towards professionals.

Getting the retro direct flash look in camera has just one key step: Turn the flash settings to always on.

How to get the viral retro flash look on a smartphone

On a smartphone, tap the lightning bolt icon to turn the flash to “Flash on” or “Always on.” (On an iPhone, tap the advanced settings menu icon next to the flash icon, then tap the flash option until “Flash On” pops up.)

A smartphone flash isn’t always super powerful, so the retro flash look is easiest to recreate indoors and in limited light than outdoors on a sunny day. Move the phone physically closer to the subject rather than switching to a zoom lens, as getting in close will create those dark shadows. The rear-facing flash is also the strongest, so this effect doesn’t work very well with the selfie camera.

Pro tip: If the flash look isn’t strong enough, try lowering the exposure. Taping the screen, then drag the sun slider to make the image a bit darker.

That creates the harsh shadows, but you’ll need to open a photo editing app – or apply one of Instagram’s filters – to finish the look with the retro film-like colors. Once you have taken a photo with the flash on, then just open an image editor and apply a retro preset – VSCO is my favorite for retro filters. The free VSCO camera app is also great for controlling the flash on a smartphone and adding other film-inspired effects.

How to get the retro flash look on a mirrorless or compact camera

A compact camera or a mirrorless camera can create an even stronger retro flash look, as the flash on dedicated cameras tends to be even stronger. If your camera doesn’t have a built-in flash – which is becoming more common on high-end and compact mirrorless cameras – you’ll need to add a hot shoe flash. But, even a cheap flash can mimic the direct flash look.

For the retro look, go into the camera settings and set the flash to always on. You don’t want to use auto flash because if the scene is bright enough, the flash won’t fire at all.

If you’re using a hot shoe flash, just power the flash on and leave it on auto and unmodified.

While flash modifiers are often key to getting a specific look, for the retro flash look, you want an unmodified flash – don’t add a diffuser or tilt the flash to bounce off the ceiling. Aim the flash right at the subject with no modifiers; this creates those harsh shadows.

In most instances, you won’t even need to take the flash off auto mode, as most auto flash modes tend to create those harsh shadows. But if the flash isn’t harsh enough for the retro look, use flash compensation to increase the power of the flash.

Finally, open the images in your favorite photo editor and apply a retro preset to finish the look with colors like the 35mm film the AI preset is inspired by.

I love the retro flash look – but frankly, I think using AI to get a retro look feels like an oxymoron. Using energy-hungry AI to get the look is silly when it’s as simple as turning on the flash and using a retro, non-AI filter to modify the colors.

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Today is Earth Day, and the thing that’s on my mind is how much water the AI-powered features in my photo editing software use.

In fact, this has been on my mind for some time as, earlier in the year, the UN announced that we have entered an “era of water bankruptcy,” which got me thinking about how, especially as a landscape photographer, my photographic passions affect our home planet.

I know that using some of these features consumes water, but I don’t know which ones nor how much they consume. But this is only one half of the issue because, if I wanted to find out this information, it would be far from easy, and this is a major issue, in my view.

See, pretty much none of the companies behind the major editing software tools including, but among others, Lightroom/Photoshop (Adobe), Luminar Neo (Skylum), or Capture One (Capture One A/S) publish any kind of pages dedicated to explaining how thirsty these features are.

Sure, they’ve got information touching on this buried in sustainability policies, or you could try deciphering the stats in scientific studies that try to quantify AI water usage, but, practically, who’s going to do that? Even if you wanted to, it would be so time-consuming.

Admittedly, it's not easy for these companies to precisely explain how much water a click of a button uses. Cloud-based AI features often run on infrastructure owned and managed by major cloud computing service providers such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, and it's these companies' servers that consume water to cool mechanisms that stop their data centers from overheating.

In 2025, Google said that a single query to Gemini uses roughly 0.8 oz (25 ml) of water. Of course, this doesn't directly correlate to using an AI feature in editing software, but it at least gives us an idea of the impact using AI in our workflow has, especially when you multiply it by the number of people around the world using such software.

However, more certainly needs to be done to at least give photographers like you and me a better insight into the environmental impact of our editing choices. Admittedly, I’m a huge fan of tools like Lightroom’s generative remove, which allows me to get really creative without having to run photos through Photoshop or use a bunch of different masks to achieve the same effect.

But I know that with a click of that button, water has been slurped up by a data center somewhere, perhaps unnecessarily. And when I consider the reports that have been coming out of the US in particular over the past couple of years about how local residents are now complaining about data-center-related water issues, I’d like to be better informed in order to decide, if, in fact, I want to use the AI feature at all, or dial back my editing.

There is an upside to all this, though, as what I’d consider to be the most helpful AI-powered editing features are mostly run by your computer and not cloud infrastructure in a data center. Tools like spot removal, masking, sharpening, and noise reduction – essentially, anything that doesn't require generative work – are typically run by your machine's CPU and GPU, which is great as I use these all the time.

Of course, using any digital device requires electricity, which produces its own set of environmental challenges, but at least using these AI-powered features doesn't also come at the cost of water needed for server cooling.

Either way, this speaks to my overarching point of a lack of communication from the companies behind photo editing software. I had to dig through tons of information and, admittedly, used an AI platform to help me compile all of this information.

Surely the likes of Adobe, Capture One, and Canva (the creators of Affinity) should have this information clearly displayed, or even build infographics into their software.

I don’t know… I just know that when you consider that, by 2027, AI is projected to consume half of the UK’s total water usage, and this will surely only grow, then even photographers need to be mindful of how they use the technology, regardless of how minuscule the impact of clicking a button may feel.

But again, in order to make these decisions, we need to be informed by the companies whose products we use in our creative workflows.

So, to all of the companies behind editing software, as a photographer who wants to use your tools, but who also wants to know how thirsty your tools are, please be more transparent on this, and please keep striving to develop AI features that run locally rather than on the cloud.

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I switched to one lens and zero expectations on a travel assignment. My pictures haven't been this honest in years.

I have a confession. For years, I've been telling readers and workshop attendees to shoot with a single prime lens. Learn to see at one focal length, I'd say. Use your feet, not your zoom. Understand what 35mm or 50mm actually looks like before you start accumulating glass. Sound advice, I thought. But in all honesty, I wasn't really doing it myself.

In fairness, when I started out in the 1980s, most of us had no choice. You got one lens because one lens was all you could afford – typically a 50mm (the nifty fifty). And you learned to see within that frame, to move your body rather than twist a zoom ring. You learned to anticipate where a picture was before you raised the camera to your eye. Then, over the years, the kit bag got heavier, and the seeing got lazier. I suspect I'm not alone in that.

It took Sigma Imagining to call my bluff. They asked me to shoot with their 24mm f/1.4 DG DN Art lens for a couple of months. Not a focal length I would have gravitated towards, if I'm honest. A touch too wide, I thought. But within a week or so something shifted. I stopped worrying about what I couldn't frame and started paying attention to what I could. My eye adjusted and I started using my feet.

After that experience, I found myself reaching for my Fujifilm GFX 50R with the GF 45mm f/2.8 (roughly a 35mm equivalent) almost exclusively. It just stayed on the camera. I liked knowing exactly where I needed to stand to realise what I was seeing, without fiddling or second-guessing.

So when Fujifilm released the GFX100RF with its fixed 35mm lens (a 28mm equivalent), it felt like something had been made specifically for the way I now work. Everything I needed in a smaller, lighter package that freed me to do what I love most: wander. The flâneur had found his groove.

Here's what nobody tells you about working with one lens. It doesn't limit your photography. It limits your indecision. And indecision, far more than any lack of equipment, is what kills most pictures before they're ever taken. So try it. One lens. Leave the bag at home and just walk until you get your eye in.

Canva has just announced a raft of expansions to its Professional Suite, but as a photography expert, it’s the seemingly smallest release that caught my eye: integrations between its Affinity creative software and both Capture One and DaVinci Resolve. That means the latter two pieces of software now support Affinity’s proprietary .af file type. And if you ask me, that’s a much bigger deal than it initially seems.

This integration will make it easier than ever to work between Affinity and Capture One and/or Affinity and DaVinci Resolve. And let’s not forget, Affinity is the best Photoshop alternative on the market, and Capture One is the best Lightroom alternative on the market; buddy them up with seamless file transfer makes them an even more viable alternative to Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom than ever before.

And while Capture One is admittedly rather expensive, Affinity balances the scales by being (almost) completely free. I thought Affinity and Capture One combined to deliver the best Adobe alternative workflow for photographers on the market before, and this news has only bolstered that opinion. The DaVinci Resolve integration won't be quite as ground-shaking for most creatives, but it’s still big news, made all the more interesting by Blackmagic’s news this week that DaVinci Resolve 21 is debuting stills compatibility for the very first time.

Canva's headline announcement is that its professional motion-design software, Cavalry, which Canva acquired earlier in the year, is now free. That’s right, Cavalry is taking a leaf out of Affinity’s book in that its full range of features is now free to use.

On the subject of Affinity, Canva has revealed that over five million users have adopted the free-to-use design suite since its Canva relaunch in October 2025. It’s getting a boost, too, with AI-powered assistance courtesy of Anthropic’s Claude AI, said to automate time-consuming tasks.

Finally, Canva has launched Brand Systems within Affinity. This allows users to build branded elements such as logos and photos within Affinity and publish them directly into Canva’s Brand Kit. Brand Kit is designed to help creatives retain control of branded assets, where approved assets are housed in one place for other teams to access, allowing for greater control of asset use and branding consistency.

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We all love to look back at our best shots. The ones that nailed the moment, the ones you're genuinely proud of. The ones that went from the picture in your head to the back of the camera. Still, I'd argue you learn far more from the ones that didn't work — if you're willing to actually look at them.

We live in a culture of highlights. Social media, photography groups, even the way we talk about our work — it's all curated. Nobody posts the shot where they forgot to change their white balance from tungsten before stepping outside. Nobody writes a caption saying "I loved the light here, shame I completely missed focus." We celebrate the wins and quietly bury the losses.

That's a mistake.

The shots that went wrong are the ones that actually taught me something. The technically perfect image that came out exactly as planned? I learned nothing from that. I just confirmed what I already knew. Or maybe it was blind luck, and I just guessed well without understanding. But the landscape where I misjudged the exposure and lost all the shadow detail? Sure boosting the exposure and noise reduction helped, but I paid more attention to my histogram after that. Lesson learned.

Failure has a way of making things stick.

There's a specific kind of learning that only comes from your own mistakes. You can read about depth of field until you're blue in the face, but the first time you nail focus on someone's ear instead of their eye in a wide-open portrait, something clicks. You watch the tutorial about metering in high-contrast situations, but it doesn't really land until you come home from a day out and find a sequence of otherwise lovely images with completely blown skies because of changing light. That stings enough that you remember it.

The key is actually looking at the failures, not just deleting them. Most of us cull quickly — anything that doesn't make the grade gets binned without a second glance. But there's real value in stopping and asking why. Was it technique? A wrong decision in the moment? Equipment, or just bad luck? Sometimes it genuinely is bad luck. But more often, if you're prepared to be honest, there's something you could have done differently.

It doesn't need to be a formal process. Just slow down before you hit delete and ask yourself what went wrong. That single habit will teach you more than most tutorials.

The other thing worth saying is that some of your best creative discoveries live in the failures. The Happy Accident. The motion blur you didn’t intend from a loose tripod that led to a love of intentional camera movement. The shot that was technically wrong but somehow more interesting than the "correct" version beside it. If you're too quick to delete, you miss these entirely.

The most renowned photographers still make mistakes, but move on quickly, and simply never show them. So don't be so hasty with the cull. Study the disasters first. They're not evidence that you're a bad photographer — they're evidence that you were out there shooting, trying things, pushing yourself. And they're quietly making you better, one mistake at a time.

Everywhere from Instagram to website galleries and online shopping sites like Amazon want us to use square images, and I have several clients who request only square images of their product shots and for staff portraits for their websites. 

The main reason is that a square or 1:1 aspect ratio ensures images appear neat together on websites, and square images look uniform on both desktop and mobile screens, reducing the need for multiple image shapes.

But composing so everything fits inside a square 1:1 ratio image isn’t always as straightforward as you may think. It’s very easy to assume things you think will be in your square frame as you compose, only to discover on your computer when it’s too late, important elements (eg part of a product or a person) have been chopped out of shot now the image has been cropped to a square.

You may also make the mistake of zooming in too tight, so then don’t have enough image to crop a square without losing important elements.

A simple solution I use is my camera’s aspect ratio cropping information mode, usually shown as 1:1 or 6:6 for square images in the menu. I’ve used a Canon EOS camera’s menu as an example here, but your camera will likely have a similar option to set up these guide lines.

For Canon EOS cameras the ‘Adding cropping information’ is usually hidden in Custom Functions in the orange menus. Select the 6:6 aspect ratio or similar.

Set the aspect square ratio in the menu, then vertical guidelines will appear on the left and right sides of your camera’s screen (sometimes cameras will also black out the sides so all you see is the square framing area) to provide a square for composing photos.

Now you can ensure your square compositions are good – for me it’s making sure the whole products fit in the square, and it’s only props and backgrounds that may be partially cropped, to keep the client happy.

There’s an art to setting up products, or a landscape or group of people, to fit into a square shape. It’s all too easy to set up stuff on a table-top on a backdrop, and position a family for a photo, and they’re grouped together way too wide to fit in a square.

When you shoot, instead of cropped RAW images recorded to the card, the camera should only add aspect ratio information to full images, to enable you to crop quickly to squares when batch editing your RAW images.

This is useful as sometimes you may need to move your square crop left or right for the best result in Adobe ACR or Lightroom.

Note that older cameras, like the Canon EOS 5D Mark III for instance, you will need Canon DPP software to edit crops used with these aspect ratio modes.

See also Oh no, I shot a photo at the wrong aspect ratio on my iPhone! Well, here’s how to fix it

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DaVinci Resolve has a reputation for color-grading major Hollywood films – and now those same tools are coming for still photos. DaVinci Resolve 21 will support still photos, including organizing and culling, color editing, and node-based editing – and it’s part of the free version of DaVinci Resolve.

During a livestream event on April 13, Blackmagic Design unveiled DaVinci Resolve 21. The software update brings a long list of tools for video editors, but the software also jumps into editing for still photos. Along with giving photographers access to longstanding color tools, the update gives hybrid creators working in both video and stills one program that can edit across both formats.

BlackMagic Design says that the move brings Hollywood-level color tools to still photography, giving still creators cinematic color grading tools. Cinematic photos have been a rising trend on social media lately – BlackMagic’s move brings actual cinema color tools into still photos. That list of tools includes color corrections, curves, and qualifiers – and the support goes beyond color editing as well.

Adding photo support to the longstanding video program gives still photographers access to DaVinci Resolve’s color wheels and custom curves. The programs Scopes – which are like histograms for color, including channels, hue, and saturation – are also supported on still photos.

Photographers will also find the well-known sliders for adjustments like exposure and white balance within the long-standing video editor as well.

DaVinci Resolve uses a node-based workflow rather than the layers that are popular among mainstream photo editors. Where layers in Photoshop are stacked on top of each other, nodes are a flow-chart style set of adjustments. As Blackmagic explains it, "It’s possible to add nodes in series or parallel to build complex grades, apply different corrections to different parts of an image simultaneously and use shared nodes to apply the same look across an entire album of photos at once."

The list of photo features also includes the program’s Film Look Creator, which adds film-like effects, including halation, bloom, grain, and vignetting. Relight FX, which adds lighting effects in post, also works with photos, along with Magic Mask and Depth Maps, to adjust only a portion of the image.

The program’s AI-based tools will also support increasing resolution, lowering noise, and removing unwanted distractions. AI blemish removal is also available, along with tools for smoothing skin and removing dark circles under the eyes.

While DaVinci is known for its color tools, the support for photos also gives photographers and hybrid creators a free software option for organizing and culling images. DaVinci Resolve 21’s Media Pool supports still photos and includes tools for star ratings, setting a photo as a favorite, rejecting a bad shot, and color labels. Albums are also supported.

DaVinci Resolve 21 will support native RAW files from Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon, and Sony, along with the iPhone’s ProRAW format. The software will also support wired tethering to import images from supported Sony and Canon cameras into the software as you shoot.

The added support for still photos comes alongside a long list of updates for what DaVinci Resolve is traditionally used for: videos. That list includes AI-powered focal point adjustment, a search tool, and more.

One important thing is not changing with the latest update: DaVinci Resolve 21 is still free, with a paid Studio version housing the most advanced tools. The beta version of DaVinci Resolve 21 is available to download now directly from Blackmagic Design.

This is a breaking news story. Check back for updates and a full list of features coming to DaVinci Resolve 21.

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Who among us hasn't been bored at work? However, few people are bored enough to Photoshop their boss's face for a joke and run it by them to ask if it's okay to put it on the company website - before turning them into a meme.

However, that's what a guy called Lincoln McCoy just did in the US company he works for, VanDoIt (they build customised vans for everything from mobile clinics to SWAT teams).

He Photoshopped his coworkers' faces, giving them everything from huge foreheads to funny googly eyes and amusing eyebrows, occasionally also causing them to bald, using the Liquify tool.

He then sent them the photos, asking, "Hey, we're updating everyone's photo on the website. Good to go?"

There was definitely a gender split in the replies, with women caring far more about their appearance.

Chief Management Officer Brent Cline was positively thrilled with his forehead being, shall we say, embiggened, saying, "I'm absolutely good with that because it makes me look much better than normal."

CEO Jared McCauslin, whose forehead and ears had also been greatly enlarged, along with his shirt being opened to reveal a vast expanse of chest hair, mused, "Something is off with my forehead. Other than that I say good to go!!"

The COO, Daniel Crosby, whose eyes were closer and whose eyebrows had been knitted together into a unibrow, initially replied "Approved - thank you sir," before rowing back: "Wait... I just paid attention. Why do I look like a caveman???"

Director of Sales Kaylee Anderson's eyebrows were raised and her smile was extended. When asked, "You good with this photo of you?" she replied with multiple laughing emojis, "No, what happened to my eyebrows?" When Lincoln asked, "What do you mean?", she answered, "I look like the joker."

On seeing her distended face, CFO Sally Stefancik replied, "Who dat?"

Lincoln cheekily fibbed, "I searched your name online and found this as a headshot of you?"

Sally answered, "What in the world? Maybe my eyes, definitely not my mouth."

"That's odd..." Lincoln replied.

But it was Director of Operations Shayna Dieckmann who had the bluntest response to her eyes and teeth being enlarged: "Immediately no"!

Luckily Lincoln's colleagues all had a sense of humour and allowed him to turn their responses into a video, which was then uploaded to the company Instagram earlier this week, gaining over a million views. @AlphaFox popularised the video on X, captioning it "Editing coworkers' photos weirdly and asking them if it's okay to use [them] on the company website" with a crying emoji. At the time of writing, the post had over half a million views.

"I like how the men didn't really care," commented @sloopythesloop on X.

"Proof that women read what you’ve sent and men barely skim it," said @annemariemarcantel on Instagram.

Like I say, we've all shirked in the office, but risking getting fired by turning your Photoshopped CEO into a meme is wild. Looks like VanDoIt is a fun place to work.

I pay little attention to viral photography trends on Instagram, but I've spotted one might actually help you become a better photographer as well as photo editor: color hunting.

Color hunting is the name of the craze, and it’s a pretty simple one to understand: you go out looking for a specific color to make the focal point of your images.

People from all around the world are doing it and, what I like about this trend is that, unlike most Instagram photography trends, this one focuses on composition as well as editing.

I recently wrote a piece on how, for many people, composition is no longer king, so seeing a trend bring it back into focus, so to speak, is great.

So the gist of color hunting is to pick a single color and build your compositions around it. Subjects can be anything, from a passer-by wearing a bright jacket that’s exactly the color you’re hunting or a street sign with stripes of your desired hue.

But more than this, I think the key to color hunting, and what makes it a good trend to jump on, as far as trends go, is to focus on how the particular color enhances an already strong composition.

Take a vibrant yellow sunflower on a hot, sunny day, for example. The color works well here because it plays into the summer narrative. Alternatively, a dark blue car parked on a cold street corner would work just as well on a winter’s day.

Of course, you can get as creative with color hunting as you like. But, just like a strong edit doesn’t fix a poor photo, a stand-out color doesn’t either. So, seeing the color as more than just an eye-grabbing feature – as a part of the story of the image as a whole – makes for a better image all around.

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