Photography Software

Aperty, the portrait editor from Skylum, will be discontinued November 4th. We reviewed Aperty in 2024 and found it a capable editor for portrait photographers. Using a mix of the usual develop sliders and some AI, I had heard positive reviews from people who purchased it.

In a note to users, a Skylum spokesman said:

Adobe has completed its acquisition of Topaz Labs, the company behind the upscaling and enhancement models a lot of photographers and editors already run on their own files. Topaz Labs continues as a standalone brand, its apps and models stay available on their own, and its technology is already in Adobe Firefly and Photoshop. Adobe did not disclose financial terms.

Evoto has attracted a lot of attention in the past 5 years or so. When you consider Adobe’s decades-long domination of the editing and retouching space, that is a major accomplishment. Today, Evoto has announced a major update with a variety of new culling and editing improvements for photographers. It even includes an Asset Hub designed to help photographers make money.

ACD Systems has released ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2027, and the pitch is less about what the AI can do than about where it runs. Face detection, keywording, masking, super-resolution, and image similarity all process on your computer, with no images or facial data leaving it.

Autumn brings shorter crowds, softer light, and sunrise times you can actually reach without setting three alarms. The hard part is knowing where to point the camera in the first place, especially when time is short.

Photoshop's beta build now includes a Refine Edge feature that cleans up the messy fringing left behind when you cut a subject out of one background and drop them onto another. Every click costs 20 generative credits, so the value depends on whether the result beats what you can do by hand.

Photoshop's beta 27.11 introduces Enhance Edge, an AI feature that promises to erase the halos that show up when you drop a masked subject onto a contrasting background. Hair cutouts have frustrated retouchers for decades, and any tool that claims to solve them deserves a hard look before you trust it on real work.

Photoshop's autofocus point checker inside Camera Raw 18.6 shows you exactly which points your camera locked onto, so you can catch a blurred watch face or a hand in focus before you commit to the wrong shot. That single feature answers a question you've probably asked yourself a hundred times while culling: did the camera focus where I thought it did?

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.

One Adobe employee compared a Creative Cloud to heroin for the business. The subscription you rely on to do your job is also the one built hardest to leave.

In 2014, I was at Photokina in Cologne, Germany, which at the time was still one of those wonderfully overwhelming events where it seemed like the entire photography industry had temporarily relocated into a handful of enormous convention halls.

A new open-source typeface called ShieldFont looks like ordinary text when you read it, but hands AI scrapers a corrupted version of the same page. It swaps out select words in a site's source code so bots collect subtly wrong sentences while you see the real thing.

Luminar Neo users will see an update to their app today. It’s version 1.28.0. Skylum is also moving toward a new name for the app, which is actually the original name. Neo will be dropped, leaving just Luminar.

For years, the workflow gap between Hasselblad and Capture One was one of those quietly frustrating facts of professional life.

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.

AI software for photographers is getting so good that it is both incredible and a little horrifying. Every few months, a new app claims it can save us time, but most of them still only handle one piece of the job. Aftershoot’s newest update feels different. 

Is the old way of retouching dead? With various AI plugins, the world of classical retouching is definitely changing. Recently, I tried out Retouch4Me and some of their plugins, and these are my thoughts as a working pro on whether it is something that would fit into my workflow or not, as well as where it excels and where I find it to struggle more.

If you use a Mac, you’ve probably hit this infuriating UI quirk: when you click "Upload," the macOS file picker displays microscopic thumbnails. Unlike a normal Finder window, there’s no slider to scale them up. Fortunately, there’s a permanent, 30-second fix. We just have to bypass the UI and tell macOS exactly what we want using Terminal. 

ON1 Photo Raw 2026.4 just landed, and the headline feature is Restore AI, a tool that can repair damaged prints, colorize old black-and-white images, and clean up degraded film scans. If you have a box of old family photos sitting around, this update is worth your attention. 

Adobe's subscription model has pushed a lot of creators to look for alternatives, and for years the honest answer was that nothing quite covered everything. That gap is now closing fast. 

Artificial intelligence has quickly become part of the workflow for many photographers. From culling thousands of images to automating complex edits, there's now a tool for almost every part of the process. But not all AI is built for the same job. 

For most of the past decade, Adobe was not a choice. It was the default. Lightroom and Photoshop were where photographers learned to edit, where the workflows lived, where the presets came from, and where the entire industry quietly agreed to standardize. The price hikes were annoying. The subscription model was annoying.

Choosing photo editing software is harder than it used to be. With Lightroom Classic no longer the only serious option, five credible alternatives now compete for your workflow, each with real tradeoffs in power, speed, and learning curve. 

The Nik Collection of software tools goes way back to when Nik introduced some editing plug-ins for Photoshop in the 90s. Google bought the tools in 2013 and brought several of the tools together into a collection.

Artificial intelligence is transforming creative workflows across countless industries, including photography. From automated writing assistants to advanced image generators, there's now an AI tool for almost every task imaginable. While many AI platforms offer broad capabilities, relatively few are tailored to the specific demands of real estate photography.

In a significant update to Luminar Neo, Skylum is focusing on AI-based portrait tools, as well as improving some of the included masking tools. This update is version 1.27. 

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. 

In what is a hot take only if you're an Adobe shareholder, the MacBook Neo is the biggest sign yet that Adobe's subscription model needs some major rethinking. 

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.

The new generative AI tools in Photoshop offer powerful features that can streamline your workflow and unlock new creative possibilities. In this article, I show you how to make the most of them. 

Skylum has released an update for its popular Luminar Neo editor that is incremental but will please owners. It follows a major fall update that brought many new features to the editor.