I’ve always been pretty sceptical of AI photo enhancement tools as many of them seem to be either ineffective or over processed and artificial-looking. The Restore AI process in ON1 Photo RAW Max 2026.4 has completely changed my mind.
There are those who say that a photograph has to be good straight from the camera and, if it’s not, then you can’t make it good with editing. Some hardcore SOOC (straight out of camera) fans think you can make a picture entirely in-camera. What no-one really dares to suggest, though, is that you can make a picture work with editing alone.
I decided I would do something different with this post. Instead of working on a single image or showing how to use this feature or that dialog, I thought I would try to explain a few things, like why I shoot in black and white, and the editing style I use. Most importantly, though, I wanted to look at how to edit a sequence of images so that they form a cohesive whole.
Nik Collection 9 is a major update to DxO’s popular plug-in suite. The new Color Grading filter in Nik Color Efex 9 is just one of four brand new filters in this update, and works alongside other new features including AI masking and blend modes.
I use Capture One’s Auto Adjust option a lot. I’m sure some will insist that professionals only use manual adjustments and Auto Adjust is for amateurs, but I’d like to explain why I think that’s wrong, and why Auto Adjust is actually a lot more powerful and useful than you might think.
Capture One and Lightroom both offer image cataloguing tools with powerful organization and search capabilities, but they both rely on an import process. And, if you make changes outside your catalog, you’ll have to synchronize or re-link your image files. Capture One Sessions are different. They are like ‘live’ browsing. And they are not just for tethered shooting.
The Basic Adjustments panel is one of the ‘optional’ Filters in Nik Silver Efex 8. What this means is that if you are building an effect from scratch, you can add it manually from the list of Filters in the left sidebar, or not use it at all. You will find it’s included as standard in many Silver Efex presets, though, and despite being ‘Basic’, it’s actually central to a lot of black and white ‘looks’.
Silver Efex, part of the DxO Nik Collection is one of the best editing tools you can get for black and white photography, but the range of tools available and their interactions can sometimes be difficult to unravel. So here’s a guide to one of the most basic and effective tools of all – Film Styles. It’s often enough, even on its own, to produce rich and satisfying black and white versions of your digital images.
Analog Efex is one of the creative plug-ins in the DxO Nik Collection and it’s a bit of an outlier because, first of all, it was developed by Google and not Nik Software (it appeared during Google’s ownership of the Nik Collection) and secondly, because it can produce the most amazing results from filters which individually don’t seem to amount to very much. I’ll explain.
So yes, Lightroom does have a Tone Curve panel which kind of does the same thing as levels adjustments, but you have to drag the black point and white point control points manually for each image – there’s no auto option. And yes, you can use Lightroom’s Auto tone adjustments, but these adjust eight different sliders at once, which is equally annoying. It’s why I keep going back to Capture One.