Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
I’m a little late with this one, but in case you missed it, Apple has bought the popular Mac and iPadOS photography app, Pixelmator. Or more to the point, they bought the company that makes Pixelmator. This could be a big deal, depending on what Apple ends up doing with the company and its software. It immediately gives Apple a missing piece of its professional apps puzzle that it’s been lacking ever since the company killed Aperture: a more pro level photo application.
Well, almost.
Long-time readers of the blog will know that I have long been a proponent of Capture One, but lately, I haven’t talked about it much. That’s because, to be honest, I haven’t been using it that much lately. This is due to numerous reasons, which I’ll get into in a later post, but it’s mainly due to the performance issues on 4k displays, and the crazy licence changes from a while ago. That said, I still keep an eye on development and try any new versions when they come out. Recently, Capture One released version 16.5, and it has a few new features, one of which stands out above all others. That feature is the new “Match Look” tool.
As a photographer who has used and written about a variety of software tools over the years, I have often been asked about ON1 Photo RAW. It's been some time since I last explored it and I didn’t have a particularly good experience with it in the past. However, with the release of ON1 Photo RAW 2025, the company asked me to give it another shot, so I’ve been trying the previous version and I’m happy that it’s much improved since the early days. This latest version promises significant updates, particularly around the use of AI for enhancing the editing experience. When I have had enough time to try it properly I’ll try and do a full review, but for now, here’s a breakdown of what’s new in this release.
Recently, I’ve been on sort of a Landscape and nature photography kick, so on a recent weekend, we headed to one of my favourite places to photograph on the east coast of Ireland, a place called Glendalough. I had posted the video of this a while ago, and I’m finally getting around to sharing the corresponding photographs. Click through to see the full photoshoot
DxO Labs has announced the release of DxO ViewPoint 5, an updated version of their specialised photo editing software. This tool is designed for photographers who need precise control over image geometry, perspective correction, and the effects of wide-angle lenses.
Adobe has just held its annual adobe MAX conference, and as part of the event it announced a slew of new updates across its product lines. This, of course included its Photography products, and all versions of Lightroom, Camera Raw and Photoshop have been updated. In this blog post, I’m going to cover a few of the key new features across the lineup.
Our old friends at Fuji Rumors haver caused quite a bit of a stir in the Fuji community with a recent rumour about a new camera that Fujifilm is working on. According to the rumour, the camera which probably won’t be released until 2025 will have a new sensor that is of a different size to one that Fujifilm has used before! As you can imagine this has caused rampant speculation on various social sites. The leading candidate for this “sensor size that Fujifilm hasn’t used before” is Full Frame. But if this came true it would upend years of Fuji insisting that Full Frame isn’t something they want to do.
In my latest video, I take you along on a relaxing photo walk through one of my favourite places in Ireland—Glendalough. This stunning glacial valley in the Wicklow Mountains has long been a go-to spot for me, but this trip turned out to be extra special. From misty trails to surprising wildlife encounters, it was the perfect setting for some nature photography and a calming escape into the Irish wilderness.
Every time I go to New York, I end up spending an inordinate amount of time in Grand Central station. Mainly, because we usually end up staying nearby, and it is a handy throughway to other avenues. But it’s also because it’s kind of a magical place. It is like something out of a movie, and it probably has been in many. Every time you walk through it, there are stories happening all around you.
DxO has released DxO PhotoLab 8, the latest version of its RAW image processing and correction software. This update includes several new tools and refinements aimed at providing greater control over the editing process.
A few days ago Apple held its annual iPhone event where they launched the iPhone 16 and 16 pro line, and after trying not to fall asleep after they rehashed the Apple Intelligence stuff from WWDC, I was pleasantly surprised by the new iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max. Strangely though, after the event people on social media were complaining that there wasn’t a real difference between the pro and the normal models. To which I thought: “Were they even watching the same keynote I was?” Because when I watched that segment I thought to myself, this is the most “pro” pro phone Apple has ever released. In fact, I’d go so far as to say, it’s only really now the Pro iPhone has fully earned the “Pro” name.
I’ve finally done it! My first new set of Lightroom presets in nearly five years are now available. As I mentioned in a couple of previous posts, this took a lot of work to get out the door, mainly because I haven’t done one of these sets in so long, but I’m pretty happy with the results, and I hope you will be too!
DXO Pure Raw is a very interesting application. It’s primary purpose is noise reduction, and if you’ve heard of the software, removing noise from an image is probably what you most associate with the software. However, with version 4 they opened up a very interesting alternative use of the application. By allowing you to change the way the algorithm works, you can actually turn the noise reduction down and the detail recovery up, and the result can be a pretty impressive level of detail recovery on the right kind of image. I’ve been trying this a lot recently, and when it works well, I’m really impressed by the results.
Just a quick update on the presets that I posted about last week. I made the cardinal mistake of giving a timeline for these when I wasn’t ready. So, needless to say, I was a bit optimistic when I said that I’d have them out within about a week. It’s taking a bit longer than I had anticipated (it always does) so they’re not quite ready yet! But hopefully not too much longer.
I’m delighted to share some information about a project I’ve been working on for a little while. As long time readers might know, I used to have a selection of Lightroom presets available back when I ran my own download store. Since I closed that in favour of selling on Gumroad, I have only really kept my black and white presets, T-Pan available. I had wanted to bring some of my other presets back for sale again, but when I looked at them I realised that many of them were quite dated. I started by looking to see if I could bring some of these old presets up to date, but I ended up with an entirely new set!
This is kind of a nerdy tip, but if, for whatever reason, you need to copy the settings from the main tone curve in Lightroom to the tone curve on a mask, you may be wondering how to do this, as it’s not immediately obvious. Well, there are actually two ways, and in this post (and video) I show you how to do it.
Ever since Adobe added the new masking architecture in Lightroom a few years ago, it’s totally changed the way I work with the software. I find myself using masks way more than I used to and it’s led to me approaching my edits in a whole different way. To try and take that to the limit, I set out to see if I could edit a photo entirely by just using the masks tool, and not touching the standard editing controls.
After the calamity of Adobe’s recent Terms of Service update (which it turns out wasn’t that recent) they have followed through on their promise of re-writing the terms and adding plain English explanations for the various clauses.
