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.

Pure RAW 5.5

DXO released a point upgrade for PureRAW, but this adds a very interesting feature. You can now send images from PureRAW to Photoshop as a smart object. This means the changes remain non-destructive, and you can go back in and change the settings. While this is useful, it has its limitations.

I was excited about this when I read about it, but now that I’ve tried it, I’m not sure how useful it is in the grand scheme of things. In theory, you could almost consider it as a replacement for camera raw, but because you can’t adjust exposure or anything else, it’s not really going to work like that. You can put the Camera RAW filter on top of this in photoshop as a smart object, but it treats the image as flattened RGB data and looses the ability to do highlight recovery etc. If they maybe added basic exposure correction and so on to PureRAW, it might work, but then you’re veering away from the core functionality of the software.

It’s an interesting idea, though, and perhaps I’m missing the benefits of it. The new update is now available as a free upgrade if you already have version 5. For everyone else, PureRAW 5 is available now on the DXO store, and, you can use my code: ThomasFitzgerald15 to get 15% off (new customers only, I’m afraid)

Capture One

Capture One released a new version of the software of the same name. The latest version finally addresses two of the things that were annoying (for me) about the software.

Firstly, masks can now interact. So like Lightroom and the recent update to DXO photo lab you can now combine masks in various fashions. One of the most frustrating things about the previous versions of Capture One was that if you wanted to subtract an area from a gradient, the gradient would have to be rasterised. Now out stays editable as a gradient. The interface for this is a little clunky, but it's a very welcome addition.

Secondly, and this affects far fewer people, but they finally added some of the lens profiles that were curiously missing from the software. In particular, they added the Canon RF24-105 STM lens that comes as a kit lens with many of Canon’s full frame EOS R cameras, and has done for quite some time. Yet, this hasn’t been supported until now. Just in time for me to upgrade to the F4L version and no longer need it, but anyway. I had been using PureRAW to get around this issue, but at least I can now open the files directly.

Luminar Neo 1.25

Skyrim released a new update for Luminar Neo that adds a bunch of stuff, but there’s one particular feature that's quite cool. I don’t really follow this software, or use it that much anymore, for various reasons - but I saw someone demoing this feature, and it’s actually pretty cool.

It’s called “Light Depth” and it allows you to relight a scene based on the depth of the scene. It uses AI to generate a depth map, and then you can light the scene using that map as a mask. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting it to work, or for it to be rally fake looking, but it actually works reasonably well.

Iridient Transformer Applications

There has been a major update of Iridient X-Transformer and the other versions for other cameras. This version 4 update adds a whole range of new features and improvements. Some updates are only available for Beyer Sensor cameras, but all versions get support for Jpeg XL as a compression option. You can see the full details of what’s new on the company’s website.

Nik Software and PhotoLab

Both the Nik software collection and PhotoLab from DXO also received point updates. PhotoLab added some further refinements to the redesigned masking engine and Nik added some new paper collections to Analog FX.

Conclusion

There’s been such a deluge of announcements, that I’m sure I’m missing something, but anyway. Like I said at the start, I want to move away from providing these kinds of updates, as I doubt anyone is coming here for the news. Maybe you are? Anyway, if you do want me to keep doing this kind of content, please let me know!

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