These are the latest updates from the world of photo-editing software. It’s not exhaustive because some news items are more important than others, and some are just routine marketing, but if there are any big events, I’ll cover them here.
DxO has launched ViewPoint 6, the latest update to its geometric, perspective and distortion correction software. It includes two key changes, one that allows precise and controlled perspective adjustments for individual objects rather than the whole scene and another that completely overhauls the ViewPoint workflow to make it much more useful for many photographers.
These are somewhat confusing times for Affinity Photo users. First, Canva acquires Affinity and rolls the three desktop apps (Photo, Designer, Publisher) into one and second, Canva starts the integration of Affinity with its powerful and extensive web-based AI-powered design tools. Affinity Photo has become a small cog in a very big machine, so does it still have enough to tempt photographers?
DxO leans heavily into more advanced masking tools in this latest release, though color grading, dust removal and new connectivity with Canava Affnity bring some more general updates for photographers.
It’s one of my favourite all-in-one photo organising, editing and effects tools, but Exposure X7 was launched way back in 2021. Exposure X7 is still on sale on the Exposure Software website, but there have been no new blog posts since 2022 and all of my attempts to contact the company by email (I can’t find a phone number) have failed.
This happened in the June 2026 Lightroom update, so that you can now use an AI Sharpen option powered by Topaz AI, and there’s an optional Topaz Denoise checkbox you can use alongside it. It shows Adobe’s determination to dominate the AI landscape, but at what cost? (Not to Adobe, of course, but to us.)
I’ve been using the Nik Collection for a long time and I thought DxO had already taken this wonderful plug-in suite as far as it could go… but I was wrong! Nik Collection 9 has some spectacular new filters and masking tools that I will give a full and detailed review. In the meantime, here are the highlights.
The DxO PhotoLab 9.6 update is not a major version release, so it’s a free update for existing PhotoLab 9 users, and a pretty substantial one at that. And there might be enough here to convince anyone thinking about getting DxO PhotoLab 9 to finally take the plunge.
Digitizing analog negatives is easier said than done. Black and white film poses no problems, but the orange/amber mask of color negative film is a real headache for photo editors, producing strong and unpredictable colour shifts even from one shot to the next. Capture One’s update promises to fix that with concrete digitizing advice and time-saving negative conversion tools.
DxO PureRAW is like a RAW file preprocessor, applying DxO’s now-legendary lens corrections and denoising to produce full-corrected DNG files that can be opened and edited as enhanced RAW files in other programs like Lightroom. And PureRAW 6 fixes a major pain point of its predecessor while adding a brand new and potentially game-changing new feature.
The latest version of Photoshop (January 2026) has a whole bunch of improvements which are not, for once, just about AI. Instead, there are new tools and features for photographers too (even if they are borrowed from Lightroom/Adobe Camera Raw).