Unless you’ve been living under the proverbial rock, you have undoubtedly seen the news about the Affinity suite of applications. Having being bought by Canva, the applications were just relaunched as a single super app featuring all three of the previous programmes: Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer and Affinity publisher. Not only that, but Canva has decided to give this suite away for free. Needless to say, this has sparked a lot of … let’s call it “conversation” online, with some people welcoming the move and others suspicious about it. as there is a lot of commentary out there, much of it overly hyperbolic, I wanted to address two main areas of the discussions. The first that this is going to “Kill” Adobe, and the second, what it means that Affinity is now “Free”.

Adobe has just released the latest version of Lightroom Classic. The newest update, version 15.0 brings a set of new tools and workflow improvements aimed at image selection, organisation, and fine-tuning. The release also includes the usual additions to camera and lens support.

On1 Software has just released On1 Photo Raw 2026. The latest version of the companies flagship Photo Software adds new AI-based masking, extended creative filters, integrated super-resolution tools, and improved workspace customisation.

I’ve been very busy this past week, and so once again I’ve been somewhat bad about posting on the blog. I have been buried in design work with a tight deadline and so unfortunately the tutorials and so on have had to take a back seat. I have so much photography stuff to share too, and it’s just been building up in my to-do list, so I hope you can forgive the short absence. Google’s algorithm, however, will not.

DxO has announced the release of FilmPack 8, the latest version of its film emulation software for macOS and Windows. The update brings a range of new tools designed to expand creative options and improve workflow, including a new Time Warp mode, direct integration with Adobe Photoshop, and additional film renderings. It also adds features for working with scanned negatives, updates to FilmPack’s historical Time Machine archive, and higher resolution versions of its creative effects.

I was recently in the wonderful city of Edinburgh for a few days, and while I was there I was taking some photos of the cityscape from the viewpoint of the castle. Now, I’ll have a bigger photo essay on my Scotland trip in the future, but when I got back home I was looking at these thinking that they would make great faux miniature shots.

Last week was a very interesting week for those who want to shoot video professionally. We saw the launch of 3 cinema cameras. Well, four if you count the new iPhones. At IBC in the Netherlands, Canon, Nikon and Fujifilm announced their new cinema cameras. For Canon, it was a new form factor and price point for their cinema lineup, and for Nikon and Fujifilm it was their first entry into this space.

With Apple’s latest round of operating systems having now been released, I thought I would take a little time to share my thoughts on the big redesign that Apple announced back at WWDC. I know this isn’t technically about photography, and I’m posting it on my photography blog, but as enough of my readers use Macs I figured you wouldn’t mind!

I’ve been doing some research lately on an idea I had to start selling some images directly to potential customers and clients. I used to do this before with Photoshelter, but I stopped using that platform. The more I’ve been researching the topic, the more I’ve come to realise that there really aren’t any good platforms out there for photographers. It’s actually pretty frustrating, but also an opportunity for any enterprising developers.

When Adobe recently released Lightroom 14.5, there’s one tiny feature I almost missed. Well, I did miss it until today when I discovered it by accident. It’s one of those things that’s so small you might not even notice it - I didn’t - but it can make a big difference and it’s something I think people have been wanting for a long time. You can now copy and paste only the parameters that have changed in an image.

As well as DXO Photo Lab 9, DXO also released an update for PureRAW today that Fujifilm users will be happy with. The latest version brings X-Trans support out of beta, and more importantly, it now supports all fujifilm cameras.

DxO has released PhotoLab 9, the latest version of its RAW photo editor. The update adds AI-powered masking, expanded local adjustments for noise reduction and sharpening, workflow improvements such as image stacking and batch renaming, and support for Apple HEIC/HEIF and ProRAW formats. The release also introduces DeepPRIME XD3 processing for Fujifilm X-Trans files.

It’s only been a short time since Adobe released Lightroom 14.4, but the next iteration is already out. I’m actually a little late on this - as it didn’t get much fanfare when they launched it. While this is mostly an under-the-hood update, the release does have a couple of new features and one big fix for generative remove.

One of the mildly frustrating things about shooting film in 2025, apart from the cost, is getting your negatives scanned. Most labs will scan your film at the time of development, but the results are pretty terrible. They usually give you very low-resolution scans, with horrible noise reduction and sharpening turned up to eleven. These scans are mostly useless for anything except for previews. I have tried upscaling them and processing them in the past, to make them at least suitable for social media posts, but generally to no avail. Even using super resolution in Lightroom, the results aren’t great. Enter a new feature in the latest beta version of Photoshop.

The 14.4 update to Lightroom caused quite a degree of consternation with its changes to how the software handles Denoise, Raw details and Super resolution. While I prefer the new method of applying these tools, some people really preferred the old way of creating DNG files. One of the biggest complaints I received, which is totally valid, is that when batch processing Denoise with the new method, it no longer updates in the background. If you’re doing a lot of images, this can take over Lightroom for minutes or even hours. After a bit of trial and error, I have found a way to get this to work in the background. It’s not perfect, and it’s a bit of a hack, but it means you can process hundreds of images without it taking over Lightroom.