When I first heard about the Dwarf Mini Smart Telescope, I have to admit I was skeptical. A smart telescope you can carry in a pocket (albeit a large pocket like a photographer's vest), plop down, and produce decent astrophotos seemed like a stretch. Smart telescopes have certainly evolved over the last few years, and I've reviewed a few of them.
Aperty, professional portrait retouching software, has released a new update designed to integrate more seamlessly into photographers’ existing workflows. Here are the details from Aperty.
The update reflects months of direct collaboration with users and marks a strategic shift toward deeper plug-in support, improved performance, and long-term workflow stability.
CYME has just announced Peakto 2.6, the latest version of its AI-powered media manager for Mac, introducing what is now the most comprehensive AI-driven culling and deduplication tool available for photographers and visual creators.
We’ve looked at products from Radiant Imaging Labs before, and they’ve always offered an interesting and fresh software approach for photographers.
Current owners of Luminar Neo are getting a holiday update with some new and unique features. Besides the usual bug fixes and some speed increases, Neo has added what they call an AI Assistant.
It’s been a long time coming, and it finally hit on Tuesday, with the U.S. banning new models of Chinese-made drones effective immediately.
Astrophotography has been having somewhat of a renaissance over the last few years. Part of that may be the addition of high-quality digital cameras and also computers that can take away the drudgery of aligning the telescope and finding and capturing faint objects.
DxO has been very active this year, and this month will not be an exception. The company is pumping out new, enhanced versions of three of its most popular photo-editing applications today.
I've gotten my hands on a beta of the new, and I have to say improved, Luminar Neo fall release from Skylum. It keeps everything that's good in the current version and adds a couple of new features that will likely get non-owners of the current product on board.
Skylum has announced a significant fall update for Luminar Neo coming in early November.
This version includes powerful enhancements to existing features as well as innovative new additions such as a Luminar Neo ecosystem, restoration, and an AI editing assistant.
Luminar Neo Ecosystem and Spaces
Peakto is releasing a 2.5 update to its excellent media management tool that frees it from the cloud while allowing robust search of all your media assets and enabling team sharing.
DxO has updated its film emulation package to version 8, and it's a major update. This latest version introduces two standout features: Time Warp Mode, a new interactive way to explore photography’s past, and full integration with Adobe Photoshop, giving photographers direct access to FilmPack’s creative palette.
Astrophotography is growing rapidly in popularity. Better and more reasonably priced equipment, computer control, and a heightened interest in what is in the night sky have all combined to expand the number of photographers who do night sky imaging. Some create landscapes, better termed “nightscapes,” while others focus on capturing planets, nebulae, and galaxies.
DxO PhotoLab has been the editing choice for many photographers since 2017, specializing in correcting optical defects in camera bodies and lenses. It has a large following, but Adobe, with Photoshop and Lightroom, has always been the 800-pound gorilla commanding much of the market.
This is lightning season for large parts of the U.S. and Europe and the rest of the world, especially in the Northern Hemisphere.
Where I live in Southern Arizona, we're in the monsoon season, with heavy rains and lots of electrical activity in our skies.
I reviewed PanoVolo last year and found it excellent Windows or Mac software for creating panoramic images, even 360-degree ones.
Now, PanVolo is back with some much-desired improvements and enhancements.
Here's something a little different to display your photos. It's the Aluratek ePaper frame. Photos look like printed photos, and this 13.3" Wi-Fi-connected frame can run for about a year after a charge through its built-in USB-C port.
Disk Drill has been around a long time. Its job is to recover files from damaged disks such as hard drives and SD cards—pretty much anything that holds media files.
Adobe has released, without fanfare, a work-in-progress camera app for iPhones that shows tremendous promise, and I think it will excite photographers. The app is part of Adobe's Indigo Project.
Here are some Adobe-provided sample images:
Peakto has been a premier Mac app for organizing and finding photo assets, using AI and metadata to quickly find images no matter where you have hidden them. Now, they are adding powerful collaboration tools and tools for pre-editing video, and we know a lot of our readers are also creating videos as well as still images.
Skylum and Google have teamed up to bring Luminar Photo Editor to Android and ChromeOS. This move opens up powerful AI-driven editing tools to a wider range of mobile and Chromebook users.
Locationscout is a sort of Swiss Army knife for all kinds of useful photo information. It comes in a variety of flavors: iOS, Android, and a full-featured web app.
What Does It Do?When you open the app, you'll see a selection of countries and places to explore.
The Nik Collection has been a powerful and useful tool for photo editors since DxO rescued the software from Google in 2017.
The software is used in Photoshop and has a variety of color and black-and-white effects that have proven popular.
This version 8 of the collection is a big leap over previous upgrades.
Boris Oliviero, the product director, says:
Skylum is rolling out a spring update to their popular AI-based editing program, Luminar Neo. Users should start seeing the update today when they launch the application.
We spent some time on the new DxO PureRAW 5 when it was announced in February, but now it's out and I've had a chance to give it a run.
We've had a look at Aperty before, the new portrait editor from Skylum, which also offers the popular AI-based photo editor, Luminar.
The company says update 1.3.0 introduces powerful new retouching tools, significant UX improvements, and expanded language support, making portrait editing more efficient and precise than ever.
For Mac users, Peakto software has always been one of the premier solutions for cataloging and easily finding your media because it automatically sorts your media as it comes in, using AI to help you find images by content, colors, time of day, camera settings, and many other attributes.
took a look at the first version of Color Theory Pro last year and found it interesting and useful. Now, version 2 is out, and I find it more interesting and more useful.
The app is a plug-in for Photoshop and is aimed at landscape photographers and astrophotographers. This is the first version that deals with night sky images, so I'll start there.
I have to say that on many days, I find myself using a DxO product—most frequently, their PureRAW software, which looks at my image metadata in my RAW files and gives me a near-perfect image, correcting my sensor/lens combination, sharpening, and removing imperfections like vignettes and ringing. DxO has more than 100,000 camera/lens combinations covering almost any gear.
CYME announces that Peakto Search, the Mac-only plugin for Lightroom Classic and Capture One, is back with two new features designed to make creators’ lives easier: Instant Speech Search and Custom Metadata Display.
Well, here's something I did not expect in a mobile photo editing app, but it's a nice surprise. Skylum, which also makes the popular Luminar Neo editor, has added full raw support, an editing history feature, seamless iCloud synchronization, and an improved user interface to its iOS app that runs on iPhones and the Apple iPad.
What's New?
Small, uncomplicated automated telescopes for casual viewing seem to have taken off. Among the most popular are the Seestar, the Dwarf2, and the newer Dwarf3.
The problem is that the included editors are pretty basic, but there's enough data in these little scopes' images to get a better result than the included apps can provide.
I covered the announcement of the latest release of Radiant Photo last month. It looked promising, but reviewers didn't have it in hand to take a deep dive into the software. Now I've had it for a few days and want to share my thoughts and experiences.
First, I'm looking at the Radiant Photo 2 software from the perspective of a landscape photographer.
The new DJI Air 3S has made quite a splash in the photo and drone world, with a reasonable price, dual cameras, and robust obstacle avoidance with the addition of LIDAR.
Just when you thought you'd seen just about every editing tool, Radiant Photo comes along with a solid update to its Radiant Photo Editor that I first took a look at in 2022. Since then there have been many improvements and new tools.
This latest version is packed with features, new tools and improved workflows.
