Photo Editing, Tutorials, Photography News, and More
This blog covers a range of topics from Lightroom, Photoshop, Capture One, Fujifilm, Canon, Nikon, iPhone Photography, and more. If you want to see more of my actual photography work, visit my Portfolio and Photo Journal blog.
Why Captions, Keywords, and Other Metadata Still Matters in 2026
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?
Photo Software News Update Oct 27
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.
AI Denoise Isn't Generative AI: Debunking the Misconception
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.
New video: Create Lightroom Captions & Keywords with Siri AI in macOS 27
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.
Photo Software News update for October 5th
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.
Lightroom for iPad Finally Gets Denoise
I missed this when the recent round of Adobe Photography updates dropped for August 2026, but they added a much-requested and long-missing feature for Lightroom on the iPad. There’s not much point in me teasing it, as it’s in the title, but yes, Lightroom on iPad finally gets Denoise. And it actually works pretty well.
An Unusual Issue Slowing Down Lightroom Classic (And How I Fixed It)
I had taken some photos over the weekend, and I was processing them in Lightroom when I noticed that the software was acting unusually. When I applied a preset, the preview worked perfectly, but it took a few seconds to actually apply. At first I thought that maybe this was an issue with the new version of Lightroom, so I quit and restarted. It was then that I noticed another weird issue: the software was still trying to write the metadata to disk. So I thought that maybe my disk was running out of space. I checked, and there was still lots of room. Curiouser and curiouser I thought. While it turned out not to be a disk space issue, I was actually close to the source of the problem, thinking it was disk-related.
Lightroom Classic 15.5 Released: Three new key features in this new release
Adobe has released the latest round of Lightroom and Camera RAW updates, and in this article we’re going to concentrate on Lightroom Classic. Aside from the usual under-the-hood tweaks and bug fixes, Lightroom Classic 15.5 adds three new key features, one of which I’ve been asking for for a long time!
Editing My London Photos in DaVinci Resolve
On a recent trip to London, I took quite a few photos and some video at the top of the Shard, one of London’s most famous buildings. I have already posted a few of these, and there are a lot more to come. However, in this post, I wanted to talk about the challenges I faced editing a subset of the images I took and how I addressed them. I ended up using both Lightroom and DaVinci Resolve’s new photo editing mode for these. The latter is something I particularly want to talk about, as it has some interesting abilities, as well as some quirks that those not familiar with the software should be aware of.
How to edit your photos in Camera RAW from Lightroom non-destructively
With Adobe recently adding lots of new features to Camera RAW that so far aren’t in Lightroom, users of Lightroom may be wondering how to get access to some of those new tools. Well, it’s actually very straightforward, and you can use Camera RAW from Lightroom entirely non-destructively. You just need to follow the simple workflow below.
Adobe strikes again: buys Topaz Labs
The news that Adobe has agreed to acquire Topaz Labs has hit the creative community with a collective “what the f….”. For anyone who relies on tools like Gigapixel, Photo AI, and Video AI, I’m sure this news is a bit of a worrying development, especially if you’re one of those creators who had exited the Adobe ecosystem (”you fool … there is no escape!”).
Lots of new features in Camera RAW that aren’t in Lightroom
With the last few Photoshop releases, Adobe has kept adding new features to Camera RAW. Usually, these would be added to Lightroom either at the same time or with the following release, but so recently, this hasn’t been the case. And these haven’t been minor features either, we’re talking some big, long-sought-after tools, including the colour corrector in masks, and the ability to adjust the edges and feathering of AI masks. Are we seeing a different strategy emerging from Adobe regarding its photography applications?
Lightroom and Other Adobe Photography Updates Coming This Week
A set of June updates to Adobe’s Photography applications will be released later this week. This will include Lightroom Classic, Lightroom, Photoshop and so on. For the most part, these will be bug fixes and new camera support, but there are a couple of things worth noting.
Lightroom 15.3 Adds Background AI Processing for Denoise and Super Resolution
Adobe’s latest Lightroom Classic update makes AI tools like Denoise and Super Resolution far less disruptive by moving their processing into the background, so they no longer take over the app, which is especially helpful when working through large batches. The update also includes a handful of performance improvements, better assisted culling detection, PSB sync support, and other smaller additions.
How I fixed this photo with Lightroom and Photoshop | Step by Step Editing Tutorial
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!