In my most recent Photo Journal post, I talked about my trip to Berlin back in March of this year. I had previously promised that I would make the presets I used to create the “Berlin” look on some of these available, so here it is in the post below.

Way back at the end of March of this year (2025) I was in Berlin for a couple of weeks. I blogged about this before and promised to post the second part of that, and then promptly forgot all about it. Well, better late than never! So here is part two of that trip.

Recently, I had one of my backup hard drives fail on me, and it reminded me that my archiving and backup setup for my photography needs some work. While I do have a comprehensive solution for client work, my personal projects are in a somewhat precarious state. Ideally, you should have your important data backed up in at least three places, but I suspect many people don’t do that. However, it occurred to me that I actually have multiple cloud services that I probably don’t fully utilise, so after a little thinking I came up with a way to doubly and triple protect my work going forward. It involves using Apple Photos and Lightroom desktop.

DxO has announced its Black Friday offers for 2025, running from November 18 to December 2. The discounts cover the full range of their photo editing tools including PhotoLab, PureRAW, FilmPack, ViewPoint and the Nik Collection.

There’s been so many software updates for photography software over the last week that I almost can’t keep up. It was never really my intention to have this be a news site, but I’ve somehow ended up reporting on these things a lot. Anyway, I’m trying to get away from that because there are plenty of other places to get the news from, but as there are all applications that I use, or have interest in, I’ll do a quick overview of some of the things worth checking out.

I saw a video a while ago from someone who was talking about using a cheap plastic compact film camera as an everyday carry to record just general snapshots. While most of us use our phones for that, it is undoubtedly nice to have a more film like aesthetic. Unfortunately, both the cost of buying film and the cost of developing film has skyrocketed recently. So while this is a nice idea, it’s not really practical. I’ve spent the last while exploring alternatives, and trying various ways of getting his look without it being a huge effort. Recently I’ve been trying DXO film pack, because in the just announced version 8, you can now open Apple PRO Raw files, and this actually makes a big difference.

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.