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…

Even though it was long rumoured, Apple still took the world by surprise last week when it announced the MacBook Neo. Apple’s new entry-level MacBook shatters the price floor for an Apple laptop, marking a previously unheard-of entry point for a new Apple computer. The resounding reaction has been mostly surprise at the price and enthusiasm for what this could do for the Mac market. I would say it’s the most important Apple product since the move to Apple Silicon. In fact, it could be one of the most impactful Apple Products since the iPod.

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.

A few weeks after the initial excitement of the announcement, Apple’s new “Creator Studio” bundle is finally available. Now that I’ve had a chance to take it for a test drive, I wanted to write about the experience. I’m not going to go into every detail on all the new features, but instead I wanted to take a look at the bigger picture here, and what this might mean going forward. Because, while this bundle does offer great value if you don’t have any of the apps already, there are a lot of questions and a few issues with the new bundle and how it was released.

(I’ve published this on my Medium blog as it’s not entirely about Photography.)

It’s been quite a while since I last posted to YouTube and I wanted to update everyone and start anew in 2026. So, in this video I give a quick update as to the channel, look at how bad I am at YouTube (and why) and look at plans for the channel going forward. I also take a Quick Look at my new vlogging camera and share some personal photography news!

Just a quick PSA as you may have missed this - but DxO has added full compatibility between Nik Collection 8 and the latest version of Affinity, allowing Affinity users to integrate Nik’s editing tools directly into their existing workflow. This update enables photographers and creators to use the Nik plugins inside Affinity without relying on additional host applications.

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.