Long-time readers of this blog will remember that I used to publish a newsletter, and I stopped it a good few years ago now. Part of the reason was that the platform that I was using, MailChimp, had some issues that made it quite difficult to use, and also, the changing global rules around newsletters and signups were too much to manage for me at the time. But I’ve decided to bring the newsletter back, only this time it will be a little different.

I know that it’s kind of a cliché, but I really do love a good “Autumn Leaves” photo. There’s just something about the colour and the texture that resonates with me. The normally bland and uniform shades of green turn into a vast tapestry of colour this time of year. And once they fall and start to decay further, you end up with a veritable tableau.

It’s been a busy week for photo software, mostly thanks to Adobe MAX, with Adobe releasing big updates to Photoshop and to Lightroom on both desktop and mobile. There are also some interesting releases from independent developers, including a new Lightroom Classic plug-in that might finally help you tame an out-of-control keyword list.

Adobe have just released the latest version of Lightroom: Lightroom Classic 16, and it’s a major new update with a ton of new features. These include a new Vectorscope tool, A Glow Effect, AI Depth masks and many more. I recorded a walkthrough video where I show you the new features and how to use them. There are also corresponding releases across Adobe’s photography lineup released today too, but for this post, I’m just concentrating on what is in the update to Lightroom Classic

I spent a couple of days over the past week out shooting some Autumn photographs for both my library and for a video I wanted to make. As I’ve said on this blog many, many times, Autumn is my favourite time of the year. Everywhere just explodes with colour, and the light at this time of the year is fantastic too, when it’s actually sunny, of course. You end up with a warm golden light for much of the morning, and it makes everything look that much more inviting and cosy.

This past weekend, I did something I haven’t really done in four years: I made a photography vlog. A proper, talking-to-camera, while out and about, taking photos, and showing you around type of old-school vlog. And I actually think that it’s pretty good. I’ve had this idea floating around my head for a few years, and it’s been on my to-do list for about as long. The idea was to do an “Autumn in the city” video. When you think of Autumn, you think of landscapes, forests, rivers and mountains and so on, but I wanted to show just how many Autumn photography opportunities there are in the city too.

Capture One has released a new update with a focus on portrait and colour tools, while Luminar’s autumn release combines revised automatic adjustments with a new printing workflow. Apple has also announced changes to Pixelmator Pro, and ON1 has launched its 2027 edition of its signature software.

The newly announced high-end MacBook Pros with PROLED display were probably one of the worst-kept secrets at Apple for a long time. The long-rumoured arrival of a touchscreen laptop had everyone jumping to repost the old Steve Jobs clip where he pointed out all of the issues with putting a touchscreen on a laptop. The thing is, though, the touch function on the new high-end MacBook Pro is probably the least interesting thing about it. That OLED screen, though, that will be a game changer.

After my recent video on using Siri to add captions and keywords to photos, someone on social media asked a question that kind of took me aback: “What's the point?” I had assumed everyone who was in any way into photography understood the benefit of adding keywords and captions, but I guess not. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense in a way. Phones recognise faces. Most software (except Lightroom Classic, because…Adobe) can find "dog on a beach" without a single piece of user-generated metadata, and AI seems to know what's in every picture. So why bother writing anything by hand?

In this week’s photo software news….Lightroom’s latest mobile tools offer new ways to rescue photographs, while Topaz has released fixes that should interest Mac users. The controversial PhotoCraft also continues its development, although there are still good reasons to approach it cautiously.

Someone recently left a comment on one of my videos insisting that AI Denoise was just “slop” and that a denoised photo wasn’t a real image anymore. It made me realise that some people think AI denoising works the same way as generative AI, replacing their photo with something synthesised. It doesn’t. Tools like Lightroom’s Denoise use machine learning to clean up the pixels you actually captured, removing noise while keeping the real detail, whereas generative tools invent content that was never there. In this post, I explain the difference and why a denoised photo is still your photo, just cleaner.

Next Wednesday, Apple is holding its "Pro and Tell" event. If the rumours are right, we're about to get something many of us never thought we'd see: a MacBook Pro with a touchscreen. It's reportedly an OLED model with a Dynamic Island where the notch used to be, and it would be the first Mac you can actually touch. Is this something you actually want? Will this be of any advantage to Photographers or Creatives?

In this video, I show you a cool way to use Siri AI in the new macOS 27 Golden Gate to create captions and keywords for use with Lightroom, Lightroom Classic or any photo editor, really. The trick involves using Apple’s “Visual Intelligence” feature to let Siri see what image you’re looking at, and then it can generate captions from there. I also show you how to use the new “Describe a Shortcut” feature to create a shortcut to do this quickly in one step.

DXO has released ViewPoint 6, the latest version of its software for correcting geometry, perspective and distortion. The big change in this version is the addition of AI masks to ReShape Fusion, the tool for adjusting individual parts of a scene within the frame. You can now apply a geometric correction to one element of an image using AI selection to mask the area.

A new browser-based version of Luminar has been released, bringing RAW processing and several of Skylum’s familiar editing tools to the web. There are also a couple of smaller releases worth knowing about: fixes to Exposure’s rendering on Apple Silicon Macs and a revised preview system in Topaz Gigapixel.

This edition (the first! of a new series - I hope) of “photo software news update” looks at Lightroom’s new Prompt to Edit feature, improved Reflection Removal, and the release of ON1 NoNoise AI 2027. There are also practical workflow improvements for Camera Raw and Photoshop users, plus native Affinity integration in DxO PhotoLab 10.1. Here is what has changed, which features are still in early access or beta, and what these updates could mean for your photography workflow.

A selection of photographs from our road trip across Wales, from Aberystwyth’s heritage railway and a storm over Cardigan Bay to mountain retreats, low-flying RAF aircraft, magnificent castles and Llandudno’s illuminated motorcycle parade. And Segulls. There are always seagulls.

I thought I was done with website woes when I recently upgraded to the latest version of Squarespace, but alas, the AI-dominated world we live in now has other plans. I could go into the ramifications of Google switching to its AI summaries as its primary search result and the result that is having, but I’m saving that for a bigger post. The TL;DR version is I’m becoming increasingly reluctant to write articles here, when they’re only going to be stolen and repurposed by Google, while it simultaneously kills any search traffic to the site. But there’s another problem that I’m sure most other photographers and other website owners have had to contend with, and that’s the problem of bots.