Post-Production

DxO is making PhotoLab 10 available today, with some solid new features and improvements to the existing ones. PhotoLab has become increasingly popular among raw editors because of its power and the inclusion of the DxO technology that adjusts for specific lens and camera combinations. These corrections are applied automatically upon opening a file if you use the default DxO Style – Natural preset, providing a sharp, geometrically accurate starting point before manual editing.

Camera Raw 18.6 adds a dedicated glow slider that folds several manual editing techniques into one control. If dreamy, soft light is part of your style, this changes how you build that look from scratch.

The soft glow effect has floated around photography for years, built with layers, filters, actions, and paid panels that promised the look for a fee. Adobe just baked it directly into Camera Raw, and the version that ships with the app beats every workaround people have relied on.

Creases across the front of a t-shirt sit exactly where the eye lands. Clothing wrinkles and backdrop fold lines are the kind of problem you can't always control on the day, and fixing them by hand eats hours you'd rather spend somewhere else.

Fourteen years separate two versions of the same photo, and watching one turn into the other is a quick lesson in how editing taste changes over time. Revisiting old work with newer tools shows you exactly how far your eye has traveled, and it surfaces habits you didn't know you had.

Photoshop's newest blemish tool doesn't just erase spots. It removes them while keeping the skin texture underneath exactly as it was, which is the part that has tripped up automatic retouching for years.

Adobe's August update for Lightroom Classic added a pair of sliders that quietly change how you build masks. Feather and edge controls now sit inside every AI mask, and they let you push a selection in or out until the edge sits exactly where you want.

Editing a landscape shot in harsh midday sun sounds like a losing battle, yet you can pull a flat, overexposed frame into something with depth and direction. The trick lives almost entirely in your masks.

You press the shutter once. A raw file can contain more than one admissible photograph, and the camera shows you only the version it chose.

The masking upgrade in Lightroom Classic 15.5 lets you feather and reshape AI masks after you create them, which turns rough selections into precise, believable edits. That single change addresses one of the oldest complaints about automatic masks: they grab too much, too little, or leave a telltale glow around your subject.

Skin retouching tools usually give themselves away by making faces look plastic. The new blemish removal tool inside Camera Raw takes a lighter hand, and that restraint is exactly what makes it worth learning.

Lightroom's masking tools are the single biggest gap between a flat edit and one that looks professionally dialed in. Most people skip them entirely, and their edits suffer for it.

There's a lot of competition out there for photographers' attention with recent updates of editing software. The big target for competitors is Adobe's ecosystem of programs, and many of my pro photographer friends are pretty locked in on Adobe Lightroom.

If a docking station can support or charge everything you use on your desk, this might be it. This 15-in-1 docking station powers all your devices safely and efficiently while keeping your desk neat. 

Post-processing has long been the most time-consuming part of a photographer's workflow, and the numbers back that up. According to the 2026 Zenfolio State of the Photography Industry report, about 70% of photographers spend between 26% and 75% of their working time on editing. Only 5% of photographers surveyed feel they are managing the stress of running their business well.

Many of today's advanced AI software features require extra subscriptions. This is also true for Photoshop's premium AI models in Generative Fill. But what if you could access the powerful Nano Banana AI for retouching without committing to another subscription? In this article, I reveal a pay-as-you-go method for using cutting-edge AI in Photoshop.

Imagine your editing workflow being enhanced by something that resembles the controllers you once played video games with. That, plus customizable efficiency, is what this editing console offers.

Minimalist photography is harder than it looks. When the summit of Pikes Peak closes due to a storm and your backup plan becomes a flat, windswept stretch of Colorado grassland, the only things separating a great shot from a boring one are patience, the right glass, and knowing how to work with almost nothing.

Here's how you can put the power of a single color to work to make your photos more impactful.

Blackmagic Design has changed the post-production landscape once again. But this time, it's doing so with photographers in mind.

Shooting wildlife in low light means pushing your ISO to uncomfortable limits. Here's how to handle the images in post.

Achieving tack-sharp landscape images from foreground to background is one of the more technically demanding challenges in the field. Focus stacking solves it, and it's more accessible than most people assume.

Getting skin tones right in post-processing is one of those things that separates a good portrait from a great one. The difference usually comes down to a handful of specific adjustments most people skip.

Bad audio can sink an otherwise great video. Whether your guest recorded on a laptop mic, you were stuck near an AC unit, or background music crept into your footage, the fix used to take real technical skill. Now, three AI tools can handle most of it in seconds.

If you've been paying for a Lightroom Classic subscription while quietly wondering whether it's still worth it, DxO PhotoLab 9 is a direct answer to that question. After roughly 15 years of Lightroom as his primary editing tool, Matt Day spent two months with PhotoLab 9 before canceling his Adobe subscription entirely.

DXO had a big announcement a few weeks ago with powerful new features in their raw image processor PureRAW 6. Now those features have been folded into their powerful image editor, PhotoLab, which gets a version bump to 9.6.

For detail-oriented creative work, the experience is just as important as the process itself. This new-generation pen display from Huion showcases refined features and capabilities.

Culling is the least glamorous part of any photographer's workflow, and it is also the part most likely to quietly devour your evening. Whether you are trimming a 3,000-frame wedding or whittling down a portrait session, the process of deciding what stays and what goes can stretch from minutes into hours if you let it. The frustrating part is that slow culling rarely produces better results. More often, it just produces more indecision and a nagging feeling that you cut the wrong frame. 

DxO PureRAW has been a go-to item in the workflow of photographers for years. PureRAW launched back in 2021, designed as a tool to preprocess Raw files before they go into an editor. The software de-noises your image, then corrects for defects in your optical path or the sensor. To do this, DxO maintains an extensive database of lenses and sensors so it can match your equipment to the corrections.

Premiere Pro is no longer called Premiere Pro. With version 26.0, Adobe has renamed it Premiere on Desktop, and that shift comes with tools that could change how you handle masking, transitions, and overall timeline speed.

Shooting a landscape with only a 14mm lens can leave you stuck with too much foreground and not enough subject. When the light is right but the lens is wrong, the choices you make in editing decide whether the photo survives at all.