DXO is running a special Father’s Day promotion, and my readers can get 20% off with the code THOMAS_FD26. That’s pretty much it, really! The offer runs until June 28th, and it’s only valid for new customers, I’m afraid.

Speaking of DXO, in case you missed it, I have recently been posting some tutorials and reviews on their products, including a nifty hack you can do with Nik 9’s Analogue Efex to turn your images into Red/Blue 3D. I also had a tutorial on how to fix the stretchy-people phenomenon you get with wide-angle lenses, and I did a review of the Nik 9 collection.

Note that this post contains a paid affiliate promotion. We receive a small commission on purchases made using the included code, which helps fund this site.

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.

Adobe are doing a weird thing here and lifting the embargo before the updates actually ship, so if you don’t see them in the Creative Cloud app immediately (at time of publishing), try again midweek.

Lightroom Classic and Lightroom desktop get new improvements to the AI models and technology. Assisted culling gets some improvements, and there is a new subject detection model, which they claim will improve … well…subject detection, I suppose. The biggest thing here is the new local models for Denoise. If you are on a Mac, Denoise now uses Apple’s ML cores and runs locally, so it should work even without an internet connection.

Lightroom Desktop (Or Just “Lightroom”) now lets you use Topaz AI Sharpening directly in the software, though it will cost credits. You can now also generate a video from an image directly in Lightroom (not Classic), without sending it to Firefly first, and it will use the various partner models. It’s basically the same thing; you just don’t have to send the image to Firefly first. The quality is still pretty bad in my opinion.

(See the video below - it might look ok in a little window on the web, but view it full screen and you’ll see what I mean)

Photoshop also includes updates to its on-device models, and the remove reflections tool is now available in Photoshop without going through Camera Raw. I’ve actually missed some of the recent Photoshop updates, as I don’t pay enough attention to the release notes, but in the May release, they added the local model for the remove tool, too.

Speaking of Camera Raw, there have been a whole bunch of new features added in the last few versions that have yet to make it to Lightroom. This is a bit strange, because it used to be the case that the two engines were kept relatively in sync. But with the past two versions, Camera RAW has added depth mapping in Masks, a new “Projection” tool to fix certain types of distortion, and a tool to feather AI masks (finally). None of these are in Lightroom yet.

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]]>A terrible start to the year (photographically speaking)StreetThomas FitzgeraldThu, 04 Jun 2026 08:39:15 +0000https://www.thomasfitzgerald.photography/photoblog/2026/6/recent-attempts-at-street-photography53c631e4e4b0c4d68989cbef:540c893ee4b04215b3085eaf:6a2139384617f32a867d3bebThe start of this year has been a bit weird for me, photographically speaking. I haven’t taken a large number of photographs for various reasons. The terrible weather being one of them. However, over the first six months, I have taken a few street photos, and while there aren’t many, I thought I would share them here.

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]]>Recent Attempts at Street PhotographyEditorialThomas FitzgeraldWed, 03 Jun 2026 10:57:13 +0000https://blog.thomasfitzgeraldphotography.com/blog/2026/6/fed-up-with-everything-being-a-subscription-maybe-its-time-to-regulate-subscriptions53c631e4e4b0c4d68989cbef:540c893ee4b04215b3085eaf:6a2005d80415b74251337861

While this article isn’t strictly photography-related, it addresses something that affects most of us who use computers or software. With the number of software and service subscriptions at an all-time high, and the loathing of software subscriptions even higher, maybe it’s time for governments to admit that there is a serious problem here. Companies will continue to push the envelope of what is acceptable, using increasingly sophisticated ways to lock in customers into unfriendly models. They will never regulate themselves, so maybe it’s time to consider legislation to address the issue. I’m not talking about banning subscriptions or anything, but rather regulating them so that they are a little more consumer-friendly, and a little less corporate-evil.

In the beginning, even though many people were against the idea of renting software, there were some aspects you could see as net positives. They did offer a lower entry price for people to access certain software packages than would otherwise have been feasible. When Adobe went subscription-only, despite all the pushback, it did offer a way to access its full software suite that many would have found difficult. The price was initially around €50 per month, but the full package cost more like €2500. Annual upgrades were around €1000, so it wasn’t entirely a terrible deal.

Unfortunately, any silver lining is long tarnished. Now that everything is a subscription, people are often shelling out hundreds or even thousands a month for software. And companies are constantly jacking up prices, killing products or changing their terms and conditions. Any sense of a user/developer balance has pretty much gone at this point. Now everything feels like you’re trapped in a corporate contract, whose sole purpose is to maximise shareholder returns and the user or even the product is now mostly an afterthought.

This has been getting even worse now that AI has entered the equation. The rush to make everything be about AI has pushed companies to do things that are, in many cases, against not only their interests, but also those of their shareholders and customers. Companies are funnelling money into bolting AI onto software regardless of whether it works or not. They just have to be able to say they have some AI strategy. Debt is being racked up on the promise that, at some point, this “transformative technology” will actually transform. And customers are the ones getting the most screwed.

The idea of the market sorting this out now seems a far-fetched dream, as no one is going to rock the boat now that they realise that subscriptions are the way to lock in customers and make the most money. While it may be the case that small companies are now dependent on subscriptions to even survive, I’m not sure if you can make that case for big corporations. Regardless, it seems unlikely that companies will suddenly get an infusion of moral clarity and reverse course.

So perhaps it’s time for this unchecked free-for-all to be, you know, checked. I get that some people out there are fundamentally opposed to any legislation, but something has to be done.

Humble beginnings and false starts

There have been some moves in the right direction. In the United States, under the Biden administration, the FTC was supposed to implement a rule to make cancelling subscriptions easier, but it was buried in legal challenges and is currently in limbo. It’s unclear if this will ever proceed (I did my best to research this, but couldn’t get a definitive answer to whether or not this is dead.)

The Digital Services Act in the EU includes provisions on subscriptions, but they are fairly weak and buried in bureaucratic language. For example, you can’t make cancelling a subscription harder than signing up for one. Stronger terms are currently being considered, but these are still not strong enough, in my opinion.

What is actually needed

So, what should be considered, then? I’m sure some people reading this want subscriptions banned outright, but that seems unlikely at this point. I will attempt to strike a balance with my suggestions here. Likewise, I’m by no means a legal expert, so I can’t say if any of these suggestions would be even enforceable or legal, but I do think it’s a fair compromise to protect consumers.

So, what follows are four suggestions for how to rein in the runaway subscription banditry. I don’t think any of these should be overly difficult to implement or overly onerous on companies. I’m also sure that if some of these were considered, the companies in question would push back massively.

Ban Monthly Pricing for Annual Subscriptions

This is something I’m sure everyone has come across at one point or another, and it drives me mad. When you go to sign up for a subscription, either to a product or a service, they give you the price of an annual plan but display it as “per month” pricing. This is totally misleading, as it’s not an actual monthly fee; it’s an annual fee. Often, the actual monthly price for a subscription is buried somewhere and is usually much pricier.

Now, to be fair, this has improved in recent years, and most places now at least display the actual yearly price in brackets beside the monthly price of said annual subscription. But not everyone. This may be because of the transparency clause in the DSA, although I’m not sure on that. In my opinion, this is not enough. They should display the actual annual fee as the price, making it the most prominently displayed. If they still want to display how this compares to the monthly price, then fine, have that the one in small print and in brackets. Regardless, the actual annual cost should be the one displayed prominently.

I know that this was standard practice for a long time, but I never understood it. It always seemed kind of scammy, and in my opinion, if you have to be this duplicitous about your pricing, it should be an immediate red flag about your actual services.

Regulate Minimum terms and cancellation fees

This is the one that Adobe got into the most actual trouble for. It still somehow gets away with it, mind you, by being marginally more transparent about it. It’s when a company offers a monthly subscription, but you have to sign up for a minimum subscription length, usually a year. This kind of thing was the typical mobile phone contract model, where you have to sign up for a two-year contract or something like that. In the case of mobile phones, though, you’re actually paying for the cost of the phone, and after the period, you get to keep the phone. With software subscriptions, there isn’t really a legitimate reason to enforce minimum contract terms like Adobe does. I do understand that some companies need a long-term commitment to break even, but if that’s the case, they should just offer only annual subscriptions and be done with it. The whole thing of offering monthly subscriptions, but you have to sign up for a year, is confusing, and again, kind of scammy. This is especially true when they hide the fact that you can get charged a massive fee if you cancel early.

There have been some moves on this, at least in terms of transparency, but I think they should ban this practice outright. Much of this is down to the fact that many companies know people won’t pay subscription prices if they see the full annual fee, yet they still need revenue to make a profit (or a large enough one to appease shareholders). But again, if you have to deceive or trick your customers, isn’t that a bigger issue with your business model? I don’t know if there’s some kind of compromise to be had here, perhaps by capping the cancellation fees, but either way, this is one of the most egregious practices by companies selling software subscriptions.

After a set time, you get to keep the last version of the software

Another thing that really ticks people off about all software moving to subscriptions is the need to keep paying for it, indefinitely. Even when companies stop updating the software or providing any meaningful new features, you have to keep paying. In some cases, people pay just to access files. In the good old days, before the proliferation of subscription software, you could skip a version or not update, and your software would still work. If a new version of an application didn’t offer any new features that you needed, you didn’t have to pay for the upgrade. You would still own the licence to use the software. This put the onus on companies to actually make upgrades worth paying for.

With subscriptions, you have to keep paying, even if you’ve paid more than the perpetual licence version of the software would ever cost. This is why people feel trapped. If you require said software for your job, and you don’t really have any alternatives, you are completely at a company’s mercy. You can’t cancel your subscription because you need access to your files, and you can’t “not pay for the upgrade” to express your dissatisfaction. The customer-developer relationship has become entirely skewed toward the developer.

To combat this and reset the balance a little, companies should allow you to keep the last working version of the software after you’ve paid for it for a set period. So, if you’ve subscribed to a software for three years, for example, and this is more than the cost of the software would have been, then if you cancel the last version you installed, it should keep working. It should effectively revert to a perpetual licence. Now, of all the suggestions here, I suspect this is the one that companies would fight the most.

Interestingly, there is one company that I know of that does this. Capture One offers a perpetual licence for free if you’ve subscribed for 5 years and then cancel. Before that, they offer discounts on their perpetual software depending on how long you’ve subscribed. I think something like this should be mandatory.

Make time-outs a mandatory option

Another thing about subscriptions is that they don’t really take into account of individuals or companies having cash flow issues. If you are a creative, this can be especially true, as the creative industry tends to ebb and flow with the seasons. Sometimes, having to continue paying for subscriptions, even when you might not need the application for a period, can be especially frustrating for people. What should be offered is the ability to “pause” a subscription.

This is especially true in situations with minimum terms; should banning that not be an option? You should be able to pause your subscription for a number of months without losing any long-term benefits or having to pay any fees. So, for example, you don’t lose any files that might be stored in the cloud and so on.

I know of some online services that already offer this option. Epidemic sound is one example. I think it would be beneficial if this were applied to software, so that you could at least open and save or export files during a paused subscription, but you just couldn’t use any other functions of the software. Obviously, you wouldn’t want to go into too many specifics, or this would be a bureaucratic nightmare, but it should be made an option. In the EU, companies must give you a 14-day grace period after you subscribe. I would consider this to be something along the same lines. Companies would have to offer a number of months’ time-out in a subscription.

Of course, this would be less of an issue if minimum terms were banned, as you could just cancel and renew. However, you would want to do so in a way that doesn’t lose any connected files, account settings and so on.

Conclusion

I realise that most of what I’ve written here is pretty much a fantasy, even if it is a reasoned one. Corporations have such dominance now that they’re pretty much calling the shots. And they’ve been using the threat of AI being some sort of mysterious force that will take over the world unless they’re allowed to continue unrestricted, as a threat to avoid any kind of legislation. For all the faults of the EU overreaching with some of their big laws, at least they’re doing something. Unfortunately, many of the big legislative projects, which start out as good ideas, tend to overreach and get buried in complex bureaucracy.

Reining in subscriptions doesn’t have to be overreach, though. A few simple steps like those outlined above could really help tilt the balance back a little towards the consumer. I’m sure many people would like to do a lot more, but I’m trying to be realistic here. Even if the very idea of regulating seems unrealistic in itself. But who knows, maybe some company will make a killing by reverting to perpetual licences, and everyone will jump back. One can dream, right?

Originally posted on my Designtography blog as a member only story

Originally, I hosted my site on a web hosting service and ran it on WordPress. But over time, I felt that I had outgrown that, and the service kept having problem after problem. So eventually, I switched to Squarespace in 2014. So I’ve basically been on this platform for 12 years now, and to be honest, lately I’m not entirely happy with it. I’ve blogged about this a few times, and I’ve regularly mentioned that I wanted to move on, possibly back to WordPress. But the problem is, I can’t. There is so much content on this site now that exporting it to WordPress is borderline impossible. After all, there is 15 years’ worth of content.

I’m currently using the previous version of Squarespace’s website software. The reason for this is that the newer version loses many features, some of which I actually use here. For example, I use the sidebar on my site, but on the new version, you can’t. So in a way, I feel trapped now. Part of me just wants to start over, but then again, as I said, there are 15 years’ worth of blog posts on here. While I can technically export my blog posts, it will lose a lot of the formatting and embedded content, such as images. It’s a precarious state to be in. I have exported it many times as a backup, but extracting the information from it would be challenging.

Ant therein lies the danger in relying on a hosted service like Squarespace. You’re entirely at their whim. Should they decide to stop supporting blog posts in the morning (which could technically happen), I could lose years of work. But apart from that, I want to move forward, and at the moment, every time I look at this, I’m reminded of the situation, and it puts me off blogging.

So for now, I’m probably going to bite the bullet and upgrade to Squarespace 7.1 (the latest version). This will mean a redesign and the loss of some features, but, in fairness, it is generally more flexible. I have already done this on my portfolio site, and while it has been a pain in some respects (there is one broken feature there that they are aware of but don’t seem to want to fix, which is holding me back). Still, I feel that I don’t have a choice because this has gotten stale and old, and the viewership is down, and my enthusiasm for it is down.

I feel that Squarespace first went all in on e-commerce at the expense of their traditional portfolio and blogging customers. Now they’re going all in on AI (like every other company out there) at the expense of, well, everyone. Which is kind of ironic given that they still sponsor loads of photographers to promote Squarespace as a way to make a portfolio site. One of the features that was really handy with Squarespace in the past was that you could import images with metadata attached for things like title and description, and it would populate that into the galleries and posts for you. This is broken in the current version. I asked support about it, and they know it’s broken but said it wasn’t a priority for them to fix. This is a crucial feature for photographers, which they still promote heavily, but they don’t want to fix it. The workaround is to re-enter all your metadata manually.

I think every platform is going through something similar. In an effort to constantly evolve and keep up with market expectations, services have become more complicated, and everything has gotten just a little crappier. I was planning to set up a mailing list again, but the platform I used, MailChimp, was acquired by Inuit, and it’s now all about driving sales. Things that used to be one or two steps, even just here in Squarespace, are now multiple steps. Simplicity has died in favour of cramming more and more features in at the expense of user experience. And with AI, everything has to have AI bolted on, even if it’s not necessary or no one wants it.

There are still some good points, though. It is still one of the best and easiest site builders for designing your website, and the newer version 7.1 offers some nice features. You can do some nice setups with it, although it takes a bit of work. It’s still far less complicated than with WordPress to set up a decent-looking site. I have been playing around with a copy of my current blog, which I upgraded to 7.1, and it looks much better than this, despite the missing elements. I mean, I don’t hate Squarespace. I still like the platform overall; I just think it might not be the best fit for magazine or blog type content, especially if it is an extra-large site like mine.

I’m planning on doing this sometime in the next few weeks. The update process takes a little time, and I have to rebuild some elements manually, so if you see things looking funky for a bit, you know what’s wrong! In the meantime, I will do my best to keep up my motivation and keep posting. I do apologise for the rant, but this has been very frustrating.

In the video, I show you how to combine two of the new features in Nik Collection 9’s Analog Efex plug-in to create a working 3d Anaglyph (blue/red) effect on your image. By combining the Chromatic Shift effect with the Depth Map, you can create a sort of 3d effect that actually works! (mostly) It’s totally pointless and has no practical value, but it’s a bit of fun!

It’s worth noting that this is far from perfect. It really only works if there’s a layer you can cut out of your scene. Ideally, you would control the separation of the left and right images with the depth map, but that’s not possible. It only fades it on and off, so this is far from a true 3d image. But it does work to create a 3d effect.

If you want to try this yourself, you can download a trial version of Nik 9 from the DXO website. You can also use my code: ThomasFitzgerald15 to get 15% off (new customers only, I’m afraid). These are the 3d glasses I got from Amazon.

Note that this post contains a paid affiliate code and affiliate links. We get a small commission for purchases made using this code, which helps run this site.

I was chatting online with fellow Irish photographer David Cleland, and he told me of a rather unfortunate situation that has happened to him. I’ve been following David for a long time. He was one of the first people I knew who was embracing the Fujifilm ecosystem in the early days. He is actually a former Fujifilm X-Photographer, and you may know him through his website, FlixelPix. Unfortunately, through a series of unfortunate events, David has lost control of that domain, and now has a new website where you can find his work.

The trouble began when a missed domain renewal set off a chain reaction that began to dismantle everything attached to it. The FlixelPix website had been online for more than 15 years, and losing it meant not just losing a web address. It also meant losing email accounts tied to the domain, years of search visibility, hard-won backlinks, and the trust of an audience built over time. Missing a domain renewal is something that is surprisingly easy to do, and it nearly happened to me recently too, so I totally feel for David in this situation.

But it gets worse. The domain did not stay dormant. It was picked up and repurposed into an AI-generated photography site, wearing David’s former identity for entirely different purposes. For a year, visitors arriving there could easily have assumed it was still his. It was not.

Then, in October 2025, the domain reappeared at auction.

At first, there was some hope. The opening bid suggested recovery might still be possible. That hope faded quickly: the price climbed past $1,000 and, ultimately, the domain sold for over $1,500, putting it out of reach. In the end, David had to walk away.

The domain has since been acquired and a website is back functioning on it. But the site is not David’s, it’s a bad clone. Parts of the site appear to have been reconstructed from archived material, and at a glance it resembles an earlier version of FlixelPix. But it is not. It is a recycled version of David’s former work, layered with advertising and affiliate content, which are of course, nothing to do with David. It’s a digital hijacking.

David has since rebuilt his presence at a new home: davidcleland.com. It is a fresh start, but not a simple one. Rebuilding means recovering what can be salvaged from backups and archives while accepting that much of what once sustained the original FlixelPix ecosystem, search presence, inbound links, and subscriber routes no longer leads where it should.

That, he says, is the hardest part: not losing the files, but losing the context. The web still remembers what was once his but no longer sends people back to him.

If there is a lesson in this, it is a simple one: do not treat domain ownership as background administration. Auto-renewals fail. Cards expire. Reminder emails get missed. When that happens, the consequences are rarely reversible.

Check your domains. Verify them. Treat them as critical infrastructure. Recovering a lost domain is far harder than preventing the loss in the first place. If you follow or link to the old FlixelPix website, it’s time to update to davidcleland.com. If you know anyone still going to the old site, make sure to inform them so they don’t get duped.

Anyone can sign up for the Capture One beta, and they have been actively promoting it recently. It used to be the case that the beta was under NDA, but for the past few years, you can talk about it freely. You can find the beta on the website. As with all beta software, be aware that this probably shouldn’t be used on work projects, and it does require you to upgrade, ore use a separate catalogue or session.

Anyway, back to the noise reduction! You will find it under the “Refine” tool tab, and it is simply named “Apply Enhanced Denoise”. Interesting that they chose to not use the term AI in the tool. When you click the checkbox to turn it on, it takes a few seconds to calculate, and then it displays the denoised version. You get a slider which you can control the amount of Denoise used. When you use the Enhanced Denoise, it disables the standard noise reduction.

So how is it?

Based on my limited testing, it seems pretty good. I tried it on an ISO 25600 image from my old Sony A6000, hardly a low-light beast. This image is basically unusable without treatment, but after applying the AI Denoise, it is usable.

Here’s my test image:

Above is the original (a crop) Here is a before and after showing the full sized image, and then and a 100% crop of the image.

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And 1:1 Crops…

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Note that in the tests above, I set the slider to 50% across all versions.

The results are, in my opinion, not quite as good as Adobe’s Denoise. It gets rid of the noise with no problem, but leaves the image looking quite soft by comparison. The Lightroom version has a more natural-looking texture. I also tried the DXO PureRaw version, and the Capture One version isn't as sharp or as detailed as the results you’ll get with DXO PureRaw. Pure Raw probably is the sharpest of the three, but it is also a little more processed-looking than the Adobe version. Some of this will be subjective, so I encourage you to try it yourself. I also don’t want to do too much testing as its still in beta.

Anyway, this is just a quick update to let you know about this and isn’t meant to be a full review or anything. As I said, it’s still in beta. I know many Capture One users have been clamouring for something like this, so now you have it. Or at least you will have it when the final version comes out!

I’ve had my Fujifilm X-E4 for a long time now, and for the most part it’s a great little camera. I’ve used it as my main “lightweight” travel and walk-around camera for years now. Any time I want to bring a camera with me and I don’t want to lug my Canon R6II, I throw the Fujifilm in the bag. I had originally bought it to replace my ageing Sony a6000 for street photography, but that never really panned out. Mainly because I didn’t do street photography as much any more, but also, an annoying bug in the camera made it difficult to use with my style of street photography.

I’m pretty sure I covered this before on the blog, but I can’t find the original post. I like to shoot from the hip with the screen flipped up. The problem with the X-E4 is that when you do this, if you bring the camera too close to your body, the image on the screen flips. This is because you can flip the screen right around 180 degrees to use as a selfie screen. But when placed vertical, the eye sensor seems to trigger the camera’s software to flip the screen.

You would think that turning the viewfinder off altogether would solve the problem, but alas it does not. I had searched for solutions online for ages but to no avail. Someone recommended using a half transparent piece of plastic over the eye sensor to make it less sensitive, but that doesn’t work at all. Covering the sensor doesn’t work either, it just triggers it. When I did finally find a solution I ignored it initially, as it just sounded too ridiculous to work. But it does.

The solution? Magnets!

Yes, you read that right. For some bizarre reason, placing a magnet on the underside of the camera in the correct spot stops the screen image flipping. The only thing I can think of is that it is related to the mechanism used when the screen is in its normal place, although the location is kind of away from there, so that doesn’t really make sense either. You need to put it on the right side of the bottom of the camera (when the lens is facing up) just where the holes are. The pull of whatever magnet is inside will pull it into place.

To test it I used the magnetic clip that came with my DJI microphone, which is a handy size. You’ll need to tape it into place, though, to stop it falling off. I genuinely wasn’t expecting this to work, but it seems to. If anyone has any explanation as to why this works, please let me know in the comments.

The only downside to this is now the screen turns off instead of flipping, but this is just the eye sensor doing its normal thing, and you need to be much closer to the camera than when it was flipping the image. You can solve this entirely by disabling the viewfinder in the menu. It’s still not an entirely ideal solution, but at least it’s a solution.

I am curious to know if this happens on the Fujifilm X-E5 also or did they fix this problem when that camera came out. If you have an X-E5, please let me know in the comments if this happens on the X-E5 too.

In the example above, I shot this image looking up at the cherry blossom, but there are still people in the frame at the bottom on the steps. If you look at them, you may notice that they look a bit funny. They look kind of stretched, as if they were taller and skinnier than they should be. This is an example of perspective distortion. You really only notice this on lenses wider than 24mm, but in this case, because of the angle I was holding it at, you can see it. Now, you may not even notice this, and it may be subtle enough that you don’t really need to care about it.

You can sort of fix this just within Lightroom. In the Transform panel, you can adjust the “Aspect” slider to stretch the image back out. This does fix the stretchy person look, but unfortunately it squeezes the whole frame uniformly, so objects in the centre are compressed, and it may alter the look of other subjects in the frame. Still, it will work in a pinch.

What you really need is a tool that will change the aspect at just the edges of the frame. Amazingly, this actually exists. It’s one of DXO’s applications that you may not know about, called DXO ViewPoint. I only know about this specific function because I made some tutorials for DXO a while ago for an earlier version. The software does a bunch of things, but it has a function to deal with this issue specifically.

So if you have DXO ViewPoint, just edit your image in ViewPoint using the menu command: Photo > Edit In > DXO ViewPoint. This will open up the application. From here, you need to go to the Volume Deformation section.

You want to use the first option here, the Horizontal and Vertical option. For this particular image, set the Horizontal to 100 (the default) and the Vertical to about 70. This immediately makes the people look less stretchy and more normal-looking. You can view the before and after by using the Before/After button at the top of the window. Once you’re happy, just hit Save to go back to Lightroom.

I don’t really know of any other tool that does this specific function. I tried doing it with the Puppet Warp tool in Photoshop, and it sort of works, but it’s tricky to get right. Another option is the Mesh Warp tool, which again could be used to fix this, but it requires some more manual work (although this is probably a better option than the Puppet Warp tool).

If you do want to try DXO Viewpoint, there is a trial version available, and if you do want to buy it, you can use my code: ThomasFitzgerald15 to get 15% off (new customers only, I’m afraid)

Incidentally, this is not a sponsored post by any means. While I am on their affiliate program, I am not being directly paid or even asked to write this. This post was entirely my own idea and DXO has no input into the content I make. If you use my affiliate code, I do get a small commission which helps pay for this site, and my coffee addiction.

This does require a little bit of setup in Capture One to get working. The first thing you need to do is make sure you have the latest versions of both applications. For Affinity, you need 3.2 or later, and for Capture One, you need 16.7.7 or later.

Next, you need to enable the application to be used in the “Open With” and “Edit With” menus. To do this, go to Capture One’s preferences and select the Plug-ins tab. From here, select the “Open With Menu” and find the Affinity application. Toggle the checkbox to enable Affinity.

Once you’ve done this, Affinity should now show up in the “Edit With” menu. But there’s one more step.

Select the image you want to send to Affinity, then right-click the thumbnail and select “Edit With > Affinity”. (For some reason, mine said “Affinity Affinity Store” in the menu, but I presume that is some sort of weird bug.) The first time you edit, make sure you select “Edit With” and not “Open With”. This brings up the Edit With options. From here, the one thing you need to change is the file format. From the pop-up menu, change it from the default to “Affinity”. Now you can go ahead and edit in Affinity.

Once you’ve made your changes, select Save in Affinity, and this will save the file and send it back to Capture One. The edited version should now show up in Capture One as if you were using any other plug-in or software.

If you want to re-edit your file in Affinity, use the “Open With” command rather than Edit With. This will open the file back in Affinity, but if you choose Edit With, it will make a fresh copy and then edit it.

And that’s pretty much it. Once you have it set up, you shouldn’t have any issues in the future. The only thing I’ve come across is that it constantly resets the format to the default or, in my case, a missing one (it’s just blank) every time you go to edit in Affinity, so perhaps there are still some bugs there. Just be sure to set the file format each time.

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Last week, Blackmagic Design announced the release of the beta version of DaVinci Resolve 21. One of the new features of that release took everyone by surprise: the software would now support photo editing. Resolve 21 now has a photo page which lets you work with RAW and non-RAW photos, with RAW support from a variety of manufacturers. Not only that, but you can use the full (almost) colour and Fusion pages with your still photos for complex colour grading and image editing. It’s a pretty big deal, although there are still quite a few limitations in the current version.

Why is Davinci Resolve Supporting Still Photos a big Deal?

So why is this such a big deal? If you have been reading about this at all, you’ve undoubtedly seen some incredibly hyperbolic articles and commentary around this release of DaVinci Resolve. People have declared it the obligatory “Lightroom Killer” (it’s not), as well as the usual round of “Can we cancel our Adobe subscriptions now?” (No.) The thing is, it’s not a “Lightroom Killer” at all. It’s not like Lightroom, really, in any way other than the fact that it works with RAW photos and has some organizational tools. And that’s actually its killer feature. It’s the fact that it’s totally different is what’s so good about it. In fact, as far as I can tell, it’s pretty unique in terms of still image editing.

Here’s a funny story. A year ago, on Threads, I actually expressed a desire for exactly this. I said that I wished Blackmagic would release a stills version of Resolve.

I never expected that they would actually do it. If you have never used node-based editing before, it can take a bit of getting used to, but once you do, you will see the power of it. I first got my taste of it way back when Apple had a fantastic compositing application called Shake. This was a superb piece of software, and I’m still bitter that they discontinued it. While this was focused on compositing rather than color correction, the concepts are the same. And with Resolve, you actually get the best of both worlds, as the Fusion page works similarly to how Shake worked (and how the industry leader, Nuke, works). I have always thought a node-based stills editor would be amazing, and as far as I can tell, there has never been a proper node-based still image editor before.

Before you get too excited though, there are a couple of big limitations with the current release that you should be aware of. Bear in mind that it is still in beta, so this may change before it is released. Firstly, there are no proper camera matching colour profiles, so your images colours will be off. Sometimes significantly. Secondly, there doesn’t seem to be any lens correction profiles, which is perhaps a bigger problem. The raw conversion engine in Resolve is primarily designed for video, so it’s not great for stills. There is poor noise control and there doesn’t appear to be any raw level noise reduction. There is spatial and temporal noise reduction in the software, but these require the studio version. I have tried these and they’re not as good as the options in still software, because again, they’re optimised for video. If you’re shooting images at high ISO the results won’t be great. In this case you would be better off using a third party converter to convert to either a DNG or a TIFF. You could use something like PureRAW to bake in the noise reduction and lens corrections, and this would solve part of the problem. It doesn’t address the colour accuracy though.

These are all things that can be improved though. The company has stated that it is working with camera manufacturers, and they do have a great track record of developing the software, so I am optimistic.

So how does it work?

When you import images, your first port of call will be the new Photo Page. Here you can access RAW controls and basic image editing controls, such as exposure, shadows, and highlights. You can also organise your images on this page, and you can create albums of photos.

The best way to think of albums in Resolve is that they are like timelines for stills. In the colour page, for example, when you are working with video, you have to have the video on a timeline in order to grade it. In the case of stills, they need to be in an album. So, instead of using albums to organise lots and lots of photos, you should think of an album as a collection for the ones you want to work on. You can do both, but when you want to start doing more extensive editing, you need to create an album just for that.

When you have done basic editing in the Photo Page and created an album, you can then do more advanced editing in the colour page. The colour page uses nodes to build up a node tree of edits. I’m not going to try and explain how this works, as it would take ages and be way beyond the scope of this article. There are plenty of videos on YouTube that explain how this works. The level of control you can achieve in here is phenomenal. You can do very precise edits with granular control over colours and more. But it’s also pretty complicated for beginners. If Lightroom is a pickup truck, then Davinci Resolve is the space shuttle.

You also have access to numerous effects and LUTs in the colour page, but be aware that many of these require the paid Studio version. Much has been made of the fact that Davinci Resolve is “free”, but there are significant limitations with the free version. Buying the Studio version isn’t entirely easy either, as you can’t buy it direct from Blackmagic Design, you have to go through a dealer. You can get it in the App Store if you’re on a Mac, but there are limitations there, and I’m not sure you get access to the Studio version of the beta if you have the App Store version.

Power Editing

There are some very powerful tools in here that are probably beyond the average user. You can, for example, convert the colour space of the RAW file to something like a log colour space, or you can work with a wide gamut intermediate colour space. This is something that is typical when editing digital cinema files, and it makes sure you don’t have any clipping or gamut issues when doing complex colour editing in the colour page. You then convert it back to RGB on output. Or you can work with HDR content too.

Another useful tool is the waveform display. I know several people have wanted waveforms for stills forever. There is a way to get waveforms for Lightroom through the use of third-party software, but it’s a bit janky and requires two monitors. Waveforms are a much better way to judge the brightness and colour values of content than a histogram, and that’s why most trained colourists swear by them. Think of it like flying by instruments.

Resolve also has some pretty powerful keying and masking tools, with much more granular control over colour and luminance keys than you can get using the masking tools in Lightroom. Of course, again, these are optimised for video, but from my testing they seem to work fine. There’s a ton of effects available too, from creative tools, like the film look creator, to more technical tools for things like colour space conversion, but as I mentioned earlier, you need the studio version for these.

You also have a complete compositing suite in the fusion page. You can use this for basic things like cloning and replacing objects in a scene, to painting out dust spots and so on. That’s really not doing it justice, and you can do some pretty complex compositing in this software. Again, I’m not going to get into it because it’s a way bigger topic than I can cover here, and also, I’m not hugely familiar with the software.

What it’s not

It’s important to reiterate what this is not. You really shouldn’t try to use this as a Lightroom replacement. It’s not really going to work for managing large quantities of photos, sorting them into projects and albums and so on. I mean, you can, but it’s going to be a world of hurt. For now though, photo editing in Davinci Resolve is best thought of as a companion to an organisational tool like Lightroom rather than a competitor to it. It’s much better suited to working on one project at a time. Narrow down the images you want to work with on a per project basis, put those in a working album, and then colour grade and do whatever other edits you want to do. Of course, if you’re working with video and you’re managing a mixed media project, then this is ideal. The cool thing about it is that all of your edits carry over across any of the “pages” in Resolve, so edits you make on a still can be used in a video project without having to export it first. And everything remains live.

Also, if you’re an amateur who just wants to do basic edits to a whole load of images, then it’s probably not for you either. It would be like using a sledgehammer to hammer in a nail. Resolve is an extremely powerful high-end tool that’s probably way more than you need if you’re just doing some basic tweaks to your photos.

I’m really not trying to be negative or put you off here, I’m just setting expectations. I’m really excited about this. By all means try it out, but be aware that you will probably need to spend a bit of time learning it in order to get the best from it. There are a ton of YouTube tutorials on how to use Davinci Resolve, so it should be no problem to find a good tutorial.

I should also point out that it’s a wee bit buggy right now too. Exporting occasionally just stops working and there’s no obvious workarounds. But again, beta !

Conclusion

As I said already, I’m really excited about this and its potential. I have wanted and dreamed about having a node based photo editor for as long as I can remember. Despite the current drawbacks, if they can address those, it’s going to be a very powerful addition to one’s creative toolset. For now, there are ways around most of them. I don’t have the full Studio version right now, but I do intend to get it shortly. When I do, and if there’s demand, I’ll do some tutorial content on how to work with Resolve specifically for stills.

DXO has just released the latest version of their venerable photography plug-in suite. Nik Collection 9 adds a whole host of new features, including some across-the-suite changes and some new filters within the individual applications. There are some very useful new changes, including AI and depth masking, as well as blend modes in some of the applications. I had access to the beta version for a few days, and here is my first look at the new suite. There is actually quite a lot going on in this, so I’ll do my best to cover everything, but I may have missed a few things.

New Masking Tools

There are a couple of changes that affect multiple applications in the suite. The biggest of these are the new masking tools. You now have two new masking options, in addition to the U-point masking that you are familiar with. These are: AI selection and depth masking.

AI Selection

Using the AI selection tools from DXO’s own PhotoLab application, the new AI masking tool allows you to use AI to select subjects and objects within your scene. You can use this anywhere you can have local selections, and you have two options. The first is to cover the area with a brush and have the AI detect the object underneath. The second is to use a marquee to draw out a box, and have it select the object contained within. Of the two, I found the second one to be easier to use. You do get an onscreen icon to indicate the selection, and you can actually move it once the selection is made to have it reselect.

There are some kinks that still need to be worked out in this, especially when it comes to combining masks. For example, in Silver Efex I was trying to apply a “ClearView” effect to the image of yours truly, but mask out my face. The AI mask wouldn’t select my glasses, and try as I might, I couldn’t combine the two masks and invert them to mask out everything but my head. When I added a second mask for my glasses and inverted that, then the rest of my face would be back in the ClearView effect. I couldn’t figure out a way to combine the two masks and invert them both. So this needs a bit of work. You really need the ability to combine masks in a group and then invert the whole group, especially when the AI detection doesn’t get everything in one pass.

Even so, it’s a really useful addition. In another demo, for one of the new filters in Analog Efex, I was able to use the AI masking perfectly, but more on that in a moment below. For the most part, this works well, so long as you can create your selection in one go, and don’t need to combine multiple masks. If you do, then it depends on the image and it depends on the filter.

Depth Masking

Another addition to the local adjustment toolbox is the arrival of depth masking. This allows you to add a mask based on the depth of a scene, and once again it uses AI to create a depth map for the image. In my testing so far, this has worked extremely well.

To activate it, you select Depth Masking from the Local Adjustment selection and then click on the image. You get two sets of controls: there’s an onscreen control and a set of parameters in the adjustments side panel. The latter gives you more granular control over the mask, and you can adjust the feathering of the near and far points. If you have used the Lens Blur tool in Lightroom, then the controls are very much the same.

You can also adjust it with the onscreen controls by dragging it up and down to move through the depth of the image, although if you have previously adjusted the feathering in the side panel, this gets reset as soon as you start dragging. I’m not sure if that’s a bug or not, but maybe one for DXO to look at in the future as it’s a bit of a pain right now.

Additional Masking Tools

There are also some additional workflow enhancements to the masking tools. The new “Local Adjustments” palette consolidates all the masking tools under one section to make them easier to find. You can now see the mask as a black-and-white image in addition to the overlay. And local adjustments can now be copied and pasted between filters.

Blend Modes

Another big change that affects multiple applications in the suite is blending modes. Filters in both Colour Efex and Analog Efex can now have blending modes applied to them. This is basically the same as the blending mode options in Photoshop and it opens up a huge new way to vary the effects within these apps.

It works really well with things like the paper textures and light effects in Analogue Efex and can give you dramatically different results with the various filters in Colour Efex.

In the example below, I added a light leak to the image and changed its blending mode from the standard “Screen X2” to “Soft Light” and reduced the opacity. You can see the default version and the one using a different blend mode below.

New Filters and Effects

There are also a bunch of new filters throughout the various applications. Here’s a quick overview and some impressions of using them:

Colour Grading in Color Efex

Color Efex gains a new colour grading tool. This is interesting because they didn't just copy a standard three-way colour corrector out of your typical editing application. Instead, it’s a unique take on this tool, by using a single colour wheel. You get a single wheel with points for shadows, mid-tones, and highlights, and an additional one for overall.

You click on one of these points and can then adjust the individual control by dragging the point or using the controls underneath the colour wheel. It looks a bit odd at first, but once you get used to it, it works quite well and is actually pretty intuitive.

Chromatic Shift in Analog Efex

This is quite a stylised filter, but you can actually produce some really nice effects with it. It allows you to separate, what would be the print passes of the image and move them. In other words, if you were printing this in a proper printing press with a CMYK colour pass, it allows you to act as if you shifted one of the passes. It’s one of those things that you could see using to make a poster or album cover or something like that.

You can select pairs of colour channels to move: Red/Cyan, Green/Magenta and Blue/Yellow. Unfortunately you can only do one at a time, and can’t combine these, without rendering out and going back in, but it’s a nice effect. I can see this being useful, especially if you’re a designer. Combine this with blend modes and you can create interesting effects.

Halation in Color Efex

The idea behind Halation is to recreate the glow you would see on older film stocks, especially around lights and highlights, and other bright areas of a scene. That’s the idea anyway, but you can also create “bloom” type glows around bright sources with this too. It’s a cool tool, and having played around with it for a while, you can create some interesting effects with it. I’m not sure how accurate it is, mind you. I have used other Halation tools, especially in video applications, and this gives a different look than they generally do. There are, however, a good few options, so you can control it quite a bit.

The only issue I have with this tool is that I would have thought that this was better suited to AnalogEfex rather than ColorEfex. As I was going through the suite for this review, I actually thought it was in AnalogEfex multiple times and kept opening that instead of ColorEfex when I wanted to use it. It just seems odd that they wouldn’t put such a specific tool aimed at recreating an analogue film effect in the software specifically designed for analogue film effects. It’s not that big a deal, it just seems odd.

Glass Effect in Analog Efex

Finally (unless I’m missing something), there’s the new Glass Effect. You can find this in AnalogEfex, and it mimics the effect of shooting through textured glass. It’s a nice effect, and you may be thinking: “It’s nice and all, but how often would I need something like this?”. Funnily enough, a few years ago, I was working on a project, and the director was looking for this exact effect on something. Now it was video, so this wouldn’t have worked anyway, but it does come up. (I ended up doing it with displacement masks and a bunch of other effects in After Effects.)

It actually renders quite nicely, and you have control over the texture and the scale of the glass effect. There are onscreen controls too, and you can use both blending modes and masks with this for added effect. In this example, I used an AI mask to cut out the deer and had the effect just on the grass.

If I had one suggestion for this, it would be to give users the ability to add their own texture maps in addition to the included ones. This would be quite useful, especially if you or your client had specific needs.

Conclusion and Additional Thoughts

This is quite a solid release from DXO, and I think Nik 9 is definitely one of the bigger Nik releases recently. The masking tools and blending modes alone are worth the upgrade in my opinion. I do have a couple of gripes after using the beta, though.

First of all, for some reason, Silver Efex seems to be running quite slowly. It takes a few seconds to update after moving sliders, and it makes it very hard to edit with it. Now, it could be just a beta bug. There are some optimisation options in the software, and it did improve after changing these to use adaptive resolution and to force it to use the GPU, but there is definitely an issue here. I noticed the same problem with PhotoLab 9, so I hope this isn’t a trend. I’m currently using an M1 Max, Mac Studio. It’s not the newest, but it's hardly a slouch either.

My other gripe is that some of the tools seem oddly placed in certain applications. For example, I would have thought that Halation should be in Analog Efex and I would have thought that the Glass effect would be better placed in the Color Efex.

I also think they need a better way to combine masks. Especially as the AI masking tools will often miss something or add something that you don’t want, and there’s no way to control or edit these. In Lightroom, for example, you can always subtract another mask, so if something is included that shouldn’t be, you can just add a brush and remove it. The masking tools here are a step in the right direction, and the AI selection will save hours for sure, but it needs the ability to combine masks or at least edit the AI mask.

Gripes aside, and they are just gripes (except for Silver Efex, that’s a problem), I do really like some of the new tools. I especially like the Halation effect and the chromatic shift. I can actually think of uses for both of these. If you’re a designer as well as a photographer, these are definitely useful tools to have.

Availability and Pricing

Nik Collection 9 is available now from the DXO website. Pricing for the collection is as follows:

New License: $179.99 | €169.99 | £149.99

Upgrades (From Nik 7 or 8): $99.99 | €89.99 | £79.99

There should be a trial version available too from the website.

You can use my code: ThomasFitzgerald15 to get 15% off (new customers only, I’m afraid)

Note, as this is an affiliate program, we do get a small commission on sales made with this code, which helps run this website.

Back when Adobe released Lightroom 14.4, they changed the way the AI tools, such as Denoise and Super Resolution, work. You no longer use the “Enhance” function to create a separate DNG. Instead, you just tick a checkbox in the detail panel. When you do this, it calculates the AI function, which takes a few seconds. Until this new release, this was done through a status bar in a dialog box that took over Lightroom, meaning you couldn’t do anything else while this was happening. This wasn’t a huge deal for single images, but if you wanted to batch process this, it could lock Lightroom up for a long time, and people were understandably frustrated about it. Fortunately, they have now moved this processing to the background, and it no longer takes over Lightroom.

There are a few limitations still. When you enable something like Denoise, editing the current image is temporarily disabled while you apply it. This makes sense, as it’s basically creating a denoised version in the background. You can still continue to edit other images.

If you apply Denoise to a batch of images, the same happens. You can’t edit any images currently being processed or ones in the queue. However, once the process on any given image is complete, you can then edit it. You can still edit other images that aren’t part of the batch being processed.

Another change is that previously, if you were batch processing images, you would apply Denoise and then you would have to choose the menu option to “update AI settings”. You don’t need to do this anymore, as this all happens automatically now.

There are a couple of other updates in this release also. Most are under the hood type things and performance improvements. This are as follows:

1. Performance Updates:

   1. Interactive slider performance for global and local edits

   2. Better memory utilisation for Full Screen Window

   3. Cloud sync download

2. Assisted Culling Improvements: Assisted Culling updates improve detection of shallow depth-of-field images and reduce false rejects for photos with intentional background blur.

3. Sync: Sync support for Photoshop Big (PSB) files

4. Film-Inspired Presets

5. Send to Firefly Boards

There’s also the usual round of new camera and lens support updates with this release too. The rest of the photography family also received updates too, including Lightroom Desktop and Mobile and Photoshop and Camera Raw.

Originally posted on my Designtography blog.

The Mac Pro has certainly had a turbulent history in recent years. All the way back to the “Trashcan” Mac Pro, and Phil Shiller’s “Can’t innovate, my ass” comment. Before the Trashcan’s introduction, Apple had let the previous generation of Mac Pro languish for several years. However, as we all know, the trashcan was a bit of a disaster for Apple, receiving only one lacklustre update in its lifetime. In 2017, Apple introduced the iMac Pro, and many thought then that this spelled the end of the Mac Pro. However, the new cheese grater was just around the corner (well, two years away) and the iMac Pro was really thought of as an interim solution for those who needed more power than the trashcan could provide. While this was a solution for many pros, (and even the regular iMac improved significantly during this time), there were still a considerable number of high-end users who required more than the iMac offered.

During this time, Apple famously offered a mea-culpa to its professional customers, and apologised for the Trashcan’s lack of updates. This was something that Apple almost never does. They promised they understood the needs of the Pro market, and said that a new “Modular” Mac Pro was on the horizon.

Enter the “new” cheese grater Mac Pro in 2019, made famous for its ridiculously expensive wheels add-on. This also saw the arrival of the Pro Display XDR. The 2019 Mac Pro was indeed innovative, and its MPX slots were unique, as were some of the processing boards they offered. However, all of this was short-lived, and much of it was made redundant by the move to Apple Silicon. The ProRes board, that was an expensive add-on at the time, was essentially built in to the Apple Silicon chips. When the Mac Studio came out, the writing was pretty much on the wall for the Mac Pro.

However, Apple did do one last iteration of the tower Mac, bringing Apple Silicon to the Mac Pro. Many felt that this was just a stop-gap solution, though, as it was essentially the guts of a Mac Studio, but with PCI slots and a hefty price tag. Unless you absolutely needed to use expansion cards, this was terrible value. And once again, Apple let it languish, with the processor never moving beyond the M2 Ultra. There were repeated rumours that Apple was planning another re-do, with a version of the M-Series chips sitting above the “Ultra” but it never materialised. And the rest, as they say, is history.

With the Mac Studio being ever more powerful, and thunderbolt 5 bridging the gap to PCI cards, it’s understandable that Apple would discontinue the Pro. I still think it’s a shame, though. I recently wrote an article on here, about why I think Apple shouldn’t kill the Mac Pro, and one of the points that I made, was that it was about more than just PCI slots. The Mac Pro’s big advantage was always less about expandability, and more about its modularity. While this was less the case in recent years, it was always useful that you could replace components should they fail. Given how locked down the Mac Studio is, Apple will no longer have a Mac that you can do this with (unless they improve the accessibility of the Mac Studio) in the future.

I’ve also seen people commenting that the Mac Pro was “stuck” at M2 Ultra, as if this was some technical limitation, but this wasn’t the case. Apple decided not to update it, rather than something preventing them from updating it. They could have done whatever they wanted. In my afore mentioned article, I outlined lots of suggestions as to what Apple could have done with the Mac Pro, including an M.2 SSD drive array, Multiple Processors and so on. Of course, none of that will ever come to pass now, but I still think they could have made something incredible (and incredibly expensive.)

With the Mac Pro now officially retired, the high-end crown falls to the Mac Studio. To be fair, the Mac Studio is far more “Apple” than the Mac Pro ever was. Apple always wanted a smaller and a more minimalist computer, and in some ways, this fulfils the dream of the Trashcan Mac, or even the infamous Mac Cube. Apple always wanted this kind of form factor, but it was only with the move to Apple Silicon that they could finally pull it off. And to be fair, the Mac Studio is a fantastic computer.

A few years ago, I replaced my Ageing 2012 Mac Pro with a Mac Studio, and I haven’t looked back since. I do still have my Mac Pro running, though. I use it as a server, and it’s a testament to how well they were built. It kept on going through both the Trashcan era and the newer Cheese grater 2.0 era.

The big issue I have with the Mac Studio, and indeed many of Apple’s current generation of Macs, is that they feel disposable. If something goes wrong, you replace it with either a new one or Apple replaces it with a refurb (if still under warrantee). And while you can of course still repair these, it’s far from something the average computer user can and will ever attempt. Over the years, on my Mac Pro, I replaced the graphic card, the RAM, and even the hard drives with an SSD. All without having to take anything apart, or even using a screwdriver. I wouldn’t even attempt to open up the Mac Studio.

However, all is not lost on this front. With the MacBook Neo, Apple has mad strides towards making it more repairable, so who knows. Maybe a future Mac Studio will have at least some user replaceable components, or at least they might make them easier to access.

But what about the high-end? Well, for now, the Mac Studio it is. Currently, the highest spec configuration is an M3 Ultra, or an M4 max, although I suspect that will change soon. We should see the M5 Max and hopefully M5 Ultra this year. But beyond that, there was an interesting rumour that Mark Gurman reported for Bloomberg. In response to the MacBook Neo, the rumour is that Apple is planning to expand both ends of the Mac market. In addition to the low-end, they are also planning new computers at the high-end, above what they currently offer. So, while the Mac Pro may now be dead, and Apple have made clear that they are not directly replacing it, perhaps there is something else in the offing. Maybe there is something entirely different coming at the high-end. That could be just another higher spec Mac Studio, or it could be something different altogether. Or it could, of course, be nothing.

Either way, it’s kind of a bittersweet day. It’s sad to see the Mac Pro go. It’s long been a faithful companion for many years, or even decades if you include its predecessor. But the future is still bright in its studio shaped form factor.

So farewell old friend. It’s a cliché, but it really is the end of an era.

In this video, I take a first look at the new Film Negative conversion tools and I walk you through the process of converting negatives and show you a little trick for getting better colour. This isn’t a tutorial, but more of a demonstration. Capture One actually has a pretty good tutorial on their website if you want to check it out.

I talk a good bit about negative lab pro in this video. To be honest, I think that is still better than these features. The main reason for this is that Negative Lab Pro includes proper colour profiles for various film types, whereas this feature in Capture One relies on doing an Auto Levels to solve the negative backing problem. However, one advantage is Capture One’s Match Look tool, which allows you to match the colour of another image. If you got low resolution scans from the Lab when you got your film processed, you can use these as a colour reference with the match look tool, making colour matching a lot easier.

The really interesting thing here is that this is yet another sign of a growing resurgence in film. DXO recently added film conversion tools to DXO Film Pack too. We also just got the news of Eastman Kodak bringing out two new films, which are essentially Portra, but it’s interesting as they are bringing it back in-house to Eastman Kodak. (The previous Portra films were distributed by Kodak Alaris - essentially a venture capital firm which had Kodak’s rights) Unfortunately film and processing is still prohibitively expensive, so I won’t be showing that much any time soon, but it’s good to see things going in the right direction.

I got the 24-105 F/4 L just before Christmas in a Sale on Amazon. While I used it a few times initially, I never got to do proper testing until recently. This was mainly because I was working super hard before Christmas, and then after Christmas, it pretty much rained here solid for two whole months. I’m not exaggerating, it really did rain almost non-stop for that long. When I did do some proper tests, I was a little frustrated at first, but figured I was doing something wrong. While there was really nice bokeh at the telephoto end, with the f/4 aperture delivering the goods, on some scenes I struggled to nail focus. This was on subjects that I would have no issues with on my STM version of the lens.

Then I noticed that while some images were nice and sharp, others were quite soft. Again, I thought I was doing something wrong, or that I was going mad, one or the other. I even did some comparisons with my F/4-F/7.1 version of the 24-105 just to see if I was imagining things. That's when it started to get a bit weird.

At 24 mm, if you shoot wide open at F/4 the lens is pretty sharp. It looks like what you would expect from a relatively expensive L series lens, and matches or exceeds the STM lens. Nothing to fault it at f/4. However, as soon as you start to stop down, it gets soft at the edges of the frame. I and not just the extreme corners, but about 10% all around. By f/8 this is quite noticeable. This is such an odd issue, as lenses normally do the opposite. They normally improve at the edges when you stop down. I’ve actually never heard of this before. I’ve never seen a lens get softer as you stop down.

Another issue, that I’m less convinced isn’t something I’m doing, is that it’s difficult to focus on certain subjects, at certain distances. For example, small flowers. The camera will tell you it’s in focus, but it will be slightly off. On a DSLR, you would say that this could be a calibration issue, but that shouldn’t really affect a mirrorless camera. Yet, the exact same subjects in the exact same lighting conditions, with the 34-105 F4-7.1 STM lens will have no trouble with these. Well, a little trouble, but that's normal. Now, this could just be user error, as there are a bajillion settings on the R6II. But it only really happens at 105 mm, and only at certain focus distances, which again makes me think it might be an issue with the lens. But it could be me. (Cue angry commenters telling me it is, in fact, me)

So I went and searched reviews of this lens and no one reported a similar finding. The 24 mm thing is so stark, I can’t believe that someone would have missed it in a normal review, so I guess it’s just my copy. After doing some more research, and downloading some online sample files, it really does seem like I have a bad copy. I always thought that the whole sample variation thing was just an internet myth. I can’t really understand how, with such expensive gear, you pretty much roll the dice whether or not you get a good one. This just doesn’t seem like a sustainable business model for companies. To be fair, this is the first time I’ve ever gotten a “bad” lens and of all the lenses I've had over the years, most have performed as expected. I also don’t think this is a “bad sample” either, I think it’s actually defective. It’s annoying because apart from this, it’s a pretty great lens. But it’s clearly not right.

I contacted Canon customer support about it, and they told me that it doesn’t sound right, and I need to send it in for service. So I will be doing that shortly, and I will report back with their findings once that happens.

The thing is, I’d be really happy if this is something stupid I was doing, because I really don’t want to have to send this lens off. There’s a whole rigmarole trying to find the right box and what not. If anyone can think of anything at all that I might be doing wrong, please let me know. The only thing that I can think of is that it could be the stabiliser. I’m going to do some more tests soon before I send it off, with some more controlled experiments, to rule out a few more things.

If you’re wondering why I’m writing this at all, it’s because it’s such a specific problem that I wanted to share it in case anyone else out there had the same issue. So I guess for now it’s back to the STM version.

To be fair, the kit lens, while slower at the telephoto end, is actually a pretty good lens. For the most part, it’s razor sharp and produces wonderfully crisp images. The only two issues with it are that it’s quite slow on the telephoto end, at 7.1, and it’s not weather sealed. The bokeh isn’t quite as nice as the F/4L version, either. Anyway, if you’ve come across this issue before, or have had similar problems, please leave a comment below, not only to help me, but for any other readers which may have similar issues and have come across this page.

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DeepPRIME XD3 for all sensors

Previously exclusive to X-Trans cameras, DeepPRIME XD3 is now also available on Bayer sensor cameras. According to the press release:

An evolution of DxO’s renowned DeepPRIME technology, DeepPRIME XD3 is designed specifically for the most demanding files captured under challenging conditions. It produces cleaner, sharper images than ever before, extracting phenomenal detail while maintaining natural textures and accurate colour reproduction. From high-ISO night scenes to finely detailed landscapes, DeepPRIME XD3 establishes a new benchmark for what’s possible in RAW conversion.

I talked about this more in my first look review of PureRAW 6 if you missed it.

AI Masks gain diffusion for smoother, more natural selections

They have now added the option to diffuse AI generated masks. This basically allows you to soften mask edges and feather selections. This is something I have been wanting for a long time in any software that generates masks with AI. It’s good to see someone finally implement this.

High-Fidelity Compression: RAW-quality DNGs up to four times smaller

This was also introduced with PureRAW 6, and now you can make compressed DNGs with PhotoLab. This is a huge space saver, as previously DNGs would be quite large, often significantly bigger than the comparable RAW files. I looked at this when I was reviewing PureRAW 6 and here’s what I found:

For example, On a 24mp file from my old Sony A6000 (which does compress the RAW file slightly too) - the RAW file is 25mb. An uncompressed DNG file from PureRAW is 109 mb while one using the new high-fidelity compression option is only 17mb.

The same space savings should apply when using DXO Photo Lab 9.6

Price and availability

DxO PhotoLab 9.6 is available today from the DxO website for macOS and Windows machines. New license $239.99 / 239.99 € / £219.99 Upgrade from DxO PhotoLab 7 or 8 $119.99 / 119.99 € / £109.99

A 30-day trial is available from the DXO website.

Version 9.6 is available as a free update to owners of DxO PhotoLab 9. You can use my code: ThomasFitzgerald15 to get 15% off (new customers only, I’m afraid)

Note that this post contains a paid affiliate code. We get a small commission for purchases made using this code, which helps run this site.

I had seen people demonstrating this on various social media networks, and thought “there’s no way that’s real”, but it is! If you don’t have the beta version of Photoshop, as long as you’re a subscriber to the photography plan, or the all apps plan, you should be able to download it. Just go to the Apps tab, and then there’s a “beta” section and you can find it there.

To get to the rotate tool, just click on the transform control on the contextual bar thingey (the technical name for it!) and then you should see the rotate object tool. Note that you have to be in 8bit mode for this to work.

I am genuinely impressed with this. It’s not perfect, but considering what it’s doing, it’s kind of magic. I can only assume it will get better in the future. I’m not a massive fan of generative AI when just used for slop or creating whole images, but as a tool like this it’s pretty impressive and actually could be of use to save time when working.