Depending on who you ask, either Photoshop or Lightroom is the world’s most popular photo editor. I’d be inclined to back Lightroom, given that it’s clearly photography-focused, whereas Photoshop is really a design tool that also does photography. But both miss a huge part of the photography style spectrum – what I’m going to call ‘organic’ photography.
Opinion
I live in an extraordinary place. And so do you
I normally post editing techniques and ideas on Life after Photoshop, but this is slightly different. It’s about where we live and how we see it – or even IF we see it. The fashion in photography is to chase around the world looking for ever more spectacular subjects, sights and experiences. Now we take photographs for audiences and algorithms, not ourselves, and that’s our loss.
Adobe Max 2025: you need AI to work out what’s going on!
If you are in the creative industry as marketeer or a content provider or an advertising agency or a publisher, you will probably eventually unravel what Adobe is offering at Adobe Max 2025 and work out what will be useful to you and what will not. Good luck.
Is this a real photograph or a fake?
It’s a fake. Good, isn’t it? The reason I know it’s a fake is because I made it myself using Adobe Firefly Generative AI. In fact the only creative input involved was how I worded my text prompt. The trouble is, when AI generated images get this good, how can we tell what’s real any more?
When black and white works better than color
I’m in the middle of writing a book about black and white photography, and one of the topics I wanted to cover was why black and white still exists in a world of color, and whether black and white images can sometimes work better. It’s a difficult argument to make, but I think I’ve found a good example.
Is Adobe trying to retire Lightroom Classic?
As of January 2025, Adobe is no longer offering its regular 20GB Photography Plan subscription to new users at its old $9.99/month price tier. Existing subscribers can continue to use it, though at an increased cost of $14.99/month. But for new users, there is now only the 1TB Lightroom Plan (now $11.99/month) and the 1TB Photography Plan ($19.99/month – as before).
Topaz Labs Cloud Rendering credits are a brand new way to charge customers
At the moment, Topaz’s Cloud processing is optional. You can still use your own computer for processing. But will there come a point where Topaz’s AI processing becomes so ‘powerful’ that it can only be done in the cloud? Convenient, huh?
Why don’t I talk about ACDSee?
I review a lot of software on Life after Photoshop but I rarely talk about ACDSee. Why? On the face of it, ACDSee Photo Studio 2025 is a powerful all-in-one photo organizing, developing and editing tool that embraces the latest developments in AI and is available both as a subscription and subscription free. So what’s not to like?
Am I impressed by Photoshop’s AI Generative Fill and Generative Expand?
Everyone’s raving about Photoshop’s new Generative Fill and Generative Expand features. So far these are confined to the Photoshop 2024 beta, but is this the future of photography, a world ruled by the imagination not reality.
Why SHOULDN’T you edit JPEGs?
For many the answer will be obvious. If you want to do any serious editing later, then shooting RAW is a must, right? Normally I’d say yes, but here’s an instance where I decided to work from the JPEG rather than a RAW file, and I’ll explain why.