Adobe has just rolled out the latest version of Lightroom, introducing an exciting new AI-powered feature: Landscape Masking. This addition promises to revolutionize how photographers and editors work with landscape images by allowing not only the selection of entire landscapes but also individual elements within them. In this post, I’ll share my hands-on experience with this new tool, highlighting its strengths, quirks, and potential.

The latest version of Pure Raw is now available from DXO. The software, DxO Pure Raw 5, was announced about a month ago at the photo plus show, and it features new versions of the companies Deep Prime AI-based processing and denoising algorithms. It also features some interface changes and some much requested workflow improvements.

A few weeks ago I got to spend some time in Berlin, and so of course I took the opportunity to try and photograph the city whenever I had a chance. While I actually had a bunch of different cameras with me, I ended up taking quite a lot of photos on my iPhone. I will cover the other photos I got with both my Fujifilm and Canon cameras in a later post, but for now, I thought I would collect all the iPhone ones into a single story!

I haven’t been using Capture One as much over the past year, and it’s for one simple reason. The lens I have with my Canon R6II isn’t supported by the software. Now, I could get into how ridiculous that is as the lens in question, the Canon RF24-105 f4-7.1 is a kit lens on several of Canon’s Cameras, but instead I’ll focus on a solution. Based on some of the comments on Reddit and Capture One’s own forums (before they inexplicably closed them) I know this isn’t the only mainstream lens not supported. So if you still want to use Capture One, but you need lens corrections, there is a solution. It’s not ideal, but it does solve the problem. Enter DXO Pure Raw.

I think I can safely say that the internet and social media has made April Fool’s Day one of the most hated days of the year. Every time it rolls around, we have to put up with a deluge of stupid jokes and a few that are good enough to be fooled by. Then there’s the actual news that you just assume is a Jobe because it’s so out there. Yes, a fun time is had by all. Not. I only partook in this ritual once and something happened today that made me think of it, but more on that in a minute. It was years ago, and it was on my old “Aperture Blog” blog. It was towards the end of Aperture before it was discontinued, and I put out a fake screenshot that I made in Photoshop and claimed that Apple had finally released Aperture X. I didn’t think anyone would fall for it as it was so obviously a joke. I was wrong.

Ever since it was released in the Asian markets a few weeks ago, I’ve been quietly obsessing over Canon’s new Powershot V1 compact camera. The original launch was somewhat muted here in the west, with no-one really getting their hands on it apart from a few Japanese photographers and filmmakers. Now that Canon has officially launched it worldwide, we’re getting more details and coverage, and I have to say, I really like what I see.

I was scrolling through instagram the other day - as one does - when I realised, after scrolling for several minutes, that I hadn’t seen a single photograph from an actual photographer. Sure, there were a few still images, but they were either from celebrities, or part of news stories. The majority of what I was seeing was reels and ads. It seems Meta really, really wants to turn Instagram into TikTok. Unfortunately, it’s becoming the worst of both worlds.

I had all these plans for a series of posts on the blog last week, and even a video I wanted to shoot, but instead I ended up spending an inordinate amount of time chasing down a bizarre Mac bug. It seems to have resolved, but the cause still eludes me. It started with a Lightroom crash, and ended up leading to a complete puzzle that plagued both my Mac Studio and my MacBook Pro. It involved several calls to Apple and even baffled them. This might not sound like a riveting read, but it’s actually a curious tale and I learned a few things along the way.

Lough Ennel in Co. Westmeath is a pretty unassuming lake in the Irish Midlands. It’s not particularly large by international standards, and if you were to ask the average person on the street here in Ireland, they’d probably tell you they’ve never heard of it. But recently it’s become somewhat famous because of a natural phenomenon that occurs there every evening during winter. A spectacular starling murmuration.

I recently came across an iOS camera app called 65×24, and I have to say—I'm loving it. It is designed for capturing images in the 65:24 aspect ratio, reminiscent of the legendary Hasselblad XPan and Fujifilm TX-1 film cameras. It also has a nice minimalist interface, that I really like.

I had been quite looking forward to our trip to Switzerland. I had never been to the country before and was pretty excited about the adventure. Our journey, while not specifically for photography, had the promise of lots of photo potential, but unfortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate. We travelled to a little town outside of Lake Zurich and on to the City of Geneva, also on a lake!

I had done a bit of research before travelling, and both spots looked beautiful and scenic. What I didn’t realise though, was that apparently at this time of the year, both locations are frequently covered in low cloud. Luckily, we still got some hours of sunshine, and I was able to see some shots of the amazing scenery, but the low cloud and bitter cold had other ideas.

DxO has announced PureRAW 5, the latest version of its RAW processing software, set for release on April 15, 2025. The update introduces local adjustments for targeted noise reduction and sharpening, a redesigned interface, and the third generation of the DeepPRIME denoising engine. Fujifilm users also gain access to a new DeepPRIME XD3 X-Trans Beta mode for enhanced detail recovery.

If there’s one thing that really annoys me more than anything else about Lightroom, it’s the halo effect you get when you use the clarity slider. If you haven’t noticed this before, I apologise in advance for pointing it out to you, because once you see it, you can’t unseen it. Once I figured out what it was I see it everywhere online. I’ve been on a quest to find away around it, and I’ve already posted a video about this before. Now I’ve come up with another potential solution to the problem. Or at least a partial solution.

In this super quick Lightroom tip, I’ll show you how to import Lightroom presets directly into Lightroom on your iPad, without the need to install them on the desktop version first!

Adobe has unveiled the latest update to Lightroom Classic. Most of the improvements are under the hood or behind the scenes type things, although there is one major new user facing feature…

I have an exclusive DxO Offer for my readers: a 20% discount on Valentine’s Day. This special offer is valid only on February 14th, so if you’re interested, please see the details in the main post…

We recently took a trip to Switzerland and visited both Lake Zurich and Lake Geneva where I braved the cold and low clouds to try and get some photos. It started with an incredible sunrise flight out of Dublin, and I managed to get some photos and video of Lake Geneva and Lake Zurich during breaks in the otherwise cloudy, foggy and incredibly cold weather. We ended the trip with an incredible flight out of Geneva over the Swiss alps before arriving back in Dublin.

This month, DxO reached a significant milestone with the release of its 100,000th DxO Camera and Lens Module. Having developed this technology for over two decades, the company is marking the occasion by offering a first-ever glimpse behind the scenes of its calibration lab.