Over the past few years, Adobe has been adding to the AI processing functionality of Lightroom, with Denoise and Super Resolution. But the OG of these, the one which was the original “Enhance Details” was what is now known as RAW Details. Most people probably only ever use this now in conjunction with the other two, and you may be wondering what is even the point of RAW details on its own. Well, I was recently going through a few photos I shot the other day, and I saw something that demonstrated perfectly how Raw Details can actually work. Allow me to explain….

Apple has just launched a new subscription bundle of creative applications for a pretty low price of $12.99 a month, or $129 a year. Called “Creator Studio”, the bundle includes Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, Compressor, and Pixelmator Pro. Weirdly though, it also includes Pages, Keynote and Numbers, which are already free. The value of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro combined would be about $600, so the subscription price is pretty good.

As I was sitting down to write a happy new year post, I realised that it was already a week old. Mind you, if you watch or read the news at all, it feels more like six months old. Anyway, my wife and I spent the first few days on a little break in one of our favourite places in Co. Wexford, which is about two hours south of us here in Dublin. We stayed in our favourite hotel, which has amazing views out over the estuary of the river Slaney.

It’s that time of the year between Christmas and New Year when the world seems to slow down, and you never know what day of the week it is. I’ve been going back over old photos in my library and pondering the past year. I actually got out to take photos quite a bit this year, but I have been really bad at sharing the projects that I was shooting. These include photographing a local stately garden throughout the seasons, visiting a national park at sunrise and sunset and a trip to Scotland to see lough ness. So, as they’ll never see the internet light of day otherwise, here’s a quick overview and some images I took over the past year.

Nik Silver Efex is one of the longest running Lightroom and Photoshop plug-ins out there, and I think it was one of the first plug-ins I ever bought. This was years ago before the suite was owned by DXO and even before they were owned by Google before that. In recent versions, some aspects of the software have changed quite a bit. As I haven’t covered it in quite a while, I thought I would share a few random tips for using the latest version.

This is a story I’ve wanted to share for a while now, but I wanted to wait until the exhibit actually started. One of my photographs is part of a Museum exhibit in New York. Even just saying that sentence seems surreal. One of my street photos (above) from New York will be part of the “Street Food City” exhibit at the Museum of Food and Drink in Brooklyn.

DxO has launched its Holiday Season promotion for 2025, and it runs until January 6, 2026. If you have been contemplating adding some of DxO’s software tools to your workflow, you can now get a 20% discount if you buy more than one application, and you can also get free support for a time.

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.