Capture One has released a new beta version of the software, that adds a much requested feature. The new release adds AI noise reduction to the photo editing application, and while currently only in Beta, it looks promising.

I’ve had my Fujifilm X-E4 for a long time now, and for the most part it’s a great little camera. I’ve used it as my main “lightweight” travel and walk-around camera for years now. Any time I want to bring a camera with me and I don’t want to lug my Canon R6II, I throw the Fujifilm in the bag. I had originally bought it to replace my ageing Sony a6000 for street photography, but that never really panned out. Mainly because I didn’t do street photography as much any more, but also, an annoying bug in the camera made it difficult to use with my style of street photography. But I finally found a solution.

This is one of those things that you might only ever come across once in the blue moon, but when you do, it’s useful to know how to fix it. If you’re shooting with a wide-angle lens, something like a 24mm or wider, and you have people at the edge of the frame, they can be distorted. This is especially true when shooting in portrait orientation and looking up. Like I said, this is a very specific situation, and it’s only by chance that I knew how to fix this.

Capture One and Canva have recently announced that Capture One will now support native Affinity files in the photo editing application. In conjunction with an update to Affinity, you can now open and save native Affinity format files in Capture One. I can’t emphasise enough how important a step this is. If you wanted to use Affinity with Capture One before this, you would have had to use the TIFF or Photoshop format, but that was an absolute pain for round-tripping because you can’t save directly in Affinity to TIFF or Photoshop; you had to export from Affinity and overwrite the file from Capture One or manually re-import. Now, round-tripping is basically as seamless as working with Photoshop.

Last week, Blackmagic Design announced the release of the beta version of DaVinci Resolve 21. One of the new features of that release took everyone by surprise: the software would now support photo editing. Resolve 21 now has a photo page which lets you work with RAW and non-RAW photos, with RAW support from a variety of manufacturers. Not only that, but you can use the full (almost) colour and Fusion pages with your still photos for complex colour grading and image editing. It’s a pretty big deal, although there are still quite a few limitations in the current version.

DXO has just released the latest version of their venerable photography plug-in suite. Nik Collection 9 adds a whole host of new features, including some across-the-suite changes and some new filters within the individual applications. There are some very useful new changes, including AI and depth masking, as well as blend modes in some of the applications. I had access to the beta version for a few days, and here is my first look at the new suite. There is actually quite a lot going on in this, so I’ll do my best to cover everything, but I may have missed a few things.

Adobe’s latest Lightroom Classic update makes AI tools like Denoise and Super Resolution far less disruptive by moving their processing into the background, so they no longer take over the app, which is especially helpful when working through large batches. The update also includes a handful of performance improvements, better assisted culling detection, PSB sync support, and other smaller additions.

It’s long been rumoured, threatened, and fantasised about, but Apple has finally put the Mac Pro out to pasture. While many people will either be unmoved by this or actually think that this is a good thing, personally I am a little sad by the retirement. As someone who has used Mac Pros, and their predecessor, the Power Mac, for decades, it really does feel like the end of an era. And, while I still think Apple could have done much more with the high-end Mac, I also understand that its time had come. It’s still sad, though.

The most recent version of Capture One added a rather interesting new toolset: the ability to work with film negatives. The software now includes the ability to work directly with scanned negatives and handles the conversion process directly in Capture One. This is specifically designed for camera scanning, and is similar to “Negative Lab Pro” for Lightroom, although there are some differences.

I wrote a blog post a long time ago about one of my biggest regrets, photographically speaking. This was the fact that I sold my Canon 5D Mark II and 24-105f4L lens. I always loved that lens, and I really regretted selling it. As I had moved on from Canon at the time, I never went and re-purchased it. But, for the past two years now, my main camera has been a Canon R6II and for the most part, I’ve been loving it. However, I had only been using the kit lens that came with it, the 24-105 F4-7.1. Which is a fine lens in its own right. But still, I longed for my old friend, or at least the updated version. Finally, a couple of months ago, in a sale, I was finally able to get the RF24-105 f/4 L. Unfortunately my reunion wasn’t as happy as I had hoped. In the end, I was quite disappointed, but there is a twist in the tale here.

Hot on the heels of the recent PureRAW version 6 release, DXO has also updated PhotoLab to version 9.6. This update includes the DeepPrime improvements that were seen with PureRAW and also a new feature for working with masks.

The latest beta version of Photoshop 27.5 has introduced an impressive new tool that lets you rotate photos of 2D objects in 3D space using AI. You can literally take a photographed object and rotate it on any axis. It’s like something out of a SciFi movie! I made a video to demonstrate it in action…

DXO have launched the latest upgrade to their RAW pre-processing software, DXO Pure RAW 6. If you’re unfamiliar with the application, it basically lets you convert Raw files to DNG using DXO’s technology, including the companies excellent noise reduction software, Deep Prime. It does so in a way that maintains edit-ability and so you can use it to work with software such as Lightroom or Capture One, but bypass their raw conversion engine to use DXO’s instead. The latest version adds a new version of DeepPrime for Beyer sensors, adds a feature people have been wanting since version one, and another new tool that was quite unexpected but works surprisingly well. Read on for the details…

I was recently in Edinburgh, Scotland for a week, and while I was there I had been planning to spend quite a bit of time out taking photos around the city. Unfortunately, the weather had other plans. It was pretty much raining and cold the whole time. And when I say cold, I do mean cold. But more than that, it was really dark. Like, twilight dark the entire time. So eventually, I forced myself to get out and shoot, regardless of the result, and said result wasn’t great. However, when I got back to my computer, with a little editing I was able to get a pretty decent image of the castle. As there was such a difference between the result I got and where I started from, It thought It would make a good tutorial video, and so here you go!

Adobe has just released new versions of its photography software suite, including Lightroom Classic and Lightroom Desktop. While mostly an under-the-hood release, there are a few new features, including the ability to you send your images directly to Adobe Firefly to create video from your photos using AI. You can also edit your images in firefly using AI. Other new features include improved Assisted Culling and Topaz Gigapixel support directly in Lightroom Desktop.

Following on from last week’s Lightroom video, where I showed you a feature of the software that not many people know about, I’ve done another collection of lesser known tips and tricks. This time, I’ve collected 5 tips that people may know some of, but may not fully know. 

When you’ve been using software for a long time you often pick up tricks and techniques and they become habits and you forget how you heard about them in the first place. I was recently editing an image for a friend in Lightroom as they watched, and when I did the technique in this video, they were surprised as they had no idea you could do that. I then realised that perhaps there is quite a few people out there who don’t know that you can do this either. That technique is editing by dragging the histogram.