‘Photography Isn’t Dying’ Says VSCO
In a world where photography software companies don't always give photography or photographers the respect they deserve, VSCO has committed to the importance of photography.
In a world where photography software companies don't always give photography or photographers the respect they deserve, VSCO has committed to the importance of photography.
Instagram has launched a new feature called Instants, a disappearing photo-sharing system designed around fast, unedited sharing with close friends. Available both inside Instagram and through a new standalone Instants app, the feature pushes even further into real-time photography and casual social sharing, with a strong emphasis on authenticity and privacy.
It has been revealed in European regulatory documents that Apple acquired a one-person software company, Patchflyer GmbH, in January. Patchflyer, or rather its sole employee, Jonathan Ochmann, created the web-based color grading tool Color.io.
Mobile photographers could have been forgiven for thinking that the beloved Google-owned photo editor Snapseed was dead before it received its first major update in years last June, bringing the app to version 3.0. Good news for Snapseed fans, the wait for the next major update was much shorter, and Snapseed 4.0 has arrived on iOS and Android.
While video professionals have grown used to seeing a major update of Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve editing software every April, this year’s update caught the attention of photographers everywhere with the debut of a new “Photo” tool. Headlines popped up instantly proclaiming that photo editing programs Lightroom and Capture One had new competition. But do they? I spent some time with the latest beta of Davinci Resolve 21, and I have some thoughts.
Amazon is rethinking how users interact with their photo libraries, rolling out a redesigned experience for Amazon Photos that shifts the focus from storage to discovery. Rather than opening to a static grid of images, the updated app now surfaces curated memories the moment users launch it, aiming to make photo libraries feel more alive and accessible.
For more than a decade, commercial photographer and retoucher John Barnard has worked across high-end campaigns for brands including Nike, Apple, Restoration Hardware, and Pottery Barn. But after 15 years in the industry, what ultimately pushed him to build his own software wasn’t a creative breakthrough or a business pivot. It was a broken tethering connection on set.
Ask any working photographer what the one thing that they cannot fix in post is, and the answer will almost always be the same: light. It's easy to clean up skin, tweak color and contrast, and even swap skies or extend backgrounds. Still, bad light has historically meant a costly reshoot, hours of painstaking compositing, or the quiet disappointment of delivering something a client doesn't like. Stockholm-based startup Vividon is looking to change that, and today it has opened early access to its AI relighting plugin for Adobe Photoshop.
EvrApp has introduced EvrBridge, stylized "evrBridge," a new Windows application designed to automate one of post-production’s more persistent workflow challenges: extracting and organizing camera metadata for use inside DaVinci Resolve. The app marks the company’s first native Windows solution built around its established metadata processing pipeline.
Blackmagic Design has released DaVinci Resolve 21 Beta 2, a quick follow-up to its recently introduced public beta. The update arrives less than a month after the initial announcement and focuses largely on stability, bug fixes, and refinements, particularly in the new photo editing tools.
Just over a week after Google added AI-powered "beautification" tools to Google Photos, the company is showing off yet another addition. This time it's a wardrobe feature that will let people virtually try on different outfits in Google Photos on Android later this summer.
Adobe has introduced a major expansion of its AI-powered creative ecosystem, integrating the Adobe for creativity connector for Anthropic’s Claude alongside a public beta of Firefly AI Assistant. The updates mark a broader push toward agentic workflows, in which creative tools are orchestrated via natural-language prompts across multiple applications.
Pic-Time has announced the launch of Pic-Time 2.0, a significant overhaul of its online gallery platform designed to reshape how photographers deliver, present, and monetize their work. The update introduces a redesigned interface, expanded customization tools, and deeper AI integration.
Adobe has released the April 2026 updates to Photoshop and Lightroom, bringing version 27.6 to desktop users with a mix of AI-driven tools, workflow refinements, and performance improvements. The update continues the company’s broader push to streamline complex editing tasks while expanding generative capabilities directly inside the app.
Abrams Studios has announced that its upcoming title, Morels: Out of This World, will release on May 28, 2026, for Windows PC via Steam. The game builds on the studio’s earlier nature-focused concepts but shifts the setting beyond Earth, placing players as explorers and photographers on a series of alien planets with unfamiliar ecosystems.
DxO is rolling out Nik Collection 9, the latest version of its suite of eight photo editing plugins, with the biggest changes coming in AI-driven selection tools. In addition, there are three new creative filters, a color grading tool, and blending mode support across its filter library.
Rode, stylized RØDE, announced many new products today at NAB 2026. Headlining the announcements is a cutting-edge new microphone technology. However, Rode also unveiled new next-generation hardware and software designed for audio professionals and content creators.
Adobe has rolled out a new round of updates across its Lightroom ecosystem, including Lightroom Classic 15.3, Lightroom Desktop 9.3, and Lightroom Mobile 11.3. The releases introduce a mix of performance improvements, AI workflow enhancements, and new creative tools designed to streamline editing and expand flexibility across devices.
Blackmagic Design unveiled DaVinci Resolve 21 this week and alongside the expected types of improvements, like more AI-powered video editing features, Blackmagic shocked the creative world by adding RAW photo editing and organization features to Resolve 21. I've been trying Resolve 21's new photo editing features since it arrived on Monday, and there's a lot to like. There's also quite a bit that isn't quite up to snuff, is just a bit too different for my tastes, or is outright confusing.
Canva’s latest round of announcements includes a wide range of updates to its expanding creative ecosystem, but one of the most impactful changes for photographers and video editors is a quieter addition: native support for Affinity’s .af file format in both Capture One and DaVinci Resolve.
Blackmagic Design has released version 3.3 of its Blackmagic Camera app for iOS, introducing a range of new features to expand the iPhone’s role in professional video production. The update adds Apple Watch control, deeper integration with ATEM switchers, and support for Blackmagic’s Focus and Zoom Demands.
Mavis has introduced a new iPad app aimed at transforming mobile devices into full-scale live production tools. Announced at NAB 2026, Mavis Studio combines multi-camera switching, streaming, recording, graphics, and audio mixing into a single, portable platform designed for creators and production teams.
When PetaPixel editor-in-chief Jaron Schneider saw Sony's cutting-edge XYN immersive display technology at CP+ 2026 in Yokohama, Japan, he described it as being like seeing through an Apple Vision Pro, but without any of the headgear. But XYN goes far beyond a single display device; XYN is an end-to-end spatial capture solution.
Adobe Premiere, which torpedoed the "Pro" in its name earlier this year, has a new "first-of-its-kind" color grading system, dubbed Color Mode.
Blackmagic Design announced DaVinci Resolve 21, a major update to the company's popular video editing platform. Despite being a video editor, one of DaVinci Resolve 21's biggest new features is a brand-new Photo page that enables colorists and photographers to use Resolve to edit still photos.
Picfair, the photography store builder, is moving further into the professional and semi-professional photography space with the introduction of private albums, a new feature designed to support client delivery workflows and more advanced use cases.
Old photos don't just fade, they slowly lose the details that make them meaningful. If you're looking for how to bring old photos back to life or make them clearer, an AI-powered tool like Aiarty Image Enhancer can serve as an essential part of the restoration workflow, offering one of the fastest and most practical solutions.
For many photographers, their photos look good on the camera’s LCD. The exposure is right and the scene looks exactly how it was envisioned. That confidence lasts until they open it on a larger screen and zoom in.
VSCO has increasingly incorporated artificial intelligence (AI) into its photography products, including AI Lab, a dedicated AI-based editing platform inside the VSCO app on iOS. To better understand how photographers feel about AI and how they want to use it in their photography workflow, VSCO conducted a survey of photographers across the U.S. and Canada in December, and the results are quite interesting. The company published its report today.
French photographer Imad Djebarni just developed a new iPhone app designed for film photographers. Pellica's primary purpose is to track which films photographers use, which is not a wholly new concept for an app. However, Pellica aims to do much more than track film.
Reeflex has released Reeflex Pro Camera 3.0, a major update to its iOS photography app that introduces enhanced capture tools, improved performance, and a redesigned interface aimed at providing DSLR-style control on iPhone.
AI in photography is a hot topic. It can range from a purely workflow tool to a portrait retoucher and even a full-blown creation tool. According to a survey of 363 photographers who either use AI as part of their workflow or are open to AI retouching tools, the vast majority believe AI should assist but not take over creative control.
A new mobile app, DualShot Recorder, skyrocketed up the App Store charts this weekend. DualShot Recorder enters the content creation space with a focused promise: eliminate the need to film the same scene twice for different aspect ratios. Designed for iPhone users, the app enables simultaneous recording in both portrait (9:16) and landscape (16:9) formats, producing two synchronized video files from a single tap.
AI-powered post-processing platform Aftershoot has published what it describes as binding public commitments, outlining three key pillars for how the company will develop, implement, and utilize artificial intelligence as part of its product offering.
Today, Adobe launched Firefly Custom Models into beta, allowing artists to generate image variations that "more consistently reflect" their own style, subject, or characters.
Affinity, the free multi-disciplinary image editing app, has been updated with three major features that it says were highly requested among users, as well as several smaller changes, including expanded camera RAW support.
DxO has released PhotoLab 9.6 to bring its more advanced noise reduction algorithms, only recently introduced when the company launched PureRAW 6. While this was an anticipated move, it makes official the expanded coverage for a wider range of cameras. This includes new edge-softening controls for its AI-based masking tools, along with a compressed DNG export option to reduce storage overhead.
Apple has acquired MotionVFX, makers of plugins for Premere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, and Final Cut Pro.
Adobe's longtime CEO, Shantanu Narayen, announced this week that he is stepping down after 18 years as CEO and nearly 30 years at the company. If you ask shareholders, Narayen was, for a long time, among the very best in the biz. If you ask Adobe's core customers, the artists who were once indispensable to the company's success, it's a different story.
The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a lawsuit against Adobe back in June 2024, alleging that the company hid fees and made it excessively challenging for its customers to cancel subscriptions. Adobe and the DOJ settled the lawsuit today, and Adobe will pay the DOJ $75 million and provide affected customers with $75 million worth of free services. Adobe maintains it did nothing wrong.
Panasonic has released a new round of firmware updates for several cameras, lenses, and companion apps in its Lumix S Series ecosystem. The updates introduce new accessory support, expanded lens customization options, and improvements to the company’s mobile workflow apps.
Canva has announced Magic Layers, a new artificial intelligence feature that transforms flat images into fully editable, layered designs within the Canva editor.
Adobe has brought its promised agentic AI assistant to Photoshop, Express, and Acrobat.
Kino, an iPhone video camera app created by Lux, the same people who make the iPhone photo camera app Halide, received a massive update today that adds Apple Log 2 support.
DxO has released PureRAW, characterizing the software as a foundational step in a photography workflow rather than just another editing tool. PureRAW’s primary focus doesn’t change with this launch, which is to work with RAW files before handing them off to other apps for more elaborate touches, be it in DxO PhotoLab, Lightroom, or Photoshop.
BorderTool Pro is a new macOS utility developed by Michael Damböck, a Fujifilm X Photographer, to streamline some of the more repetitive steps in a photographer’s workflow: adding borders, mats, and presentation-ready finishing touches to exported images. Built as a native menu-bar application, BorderTool Pro focuses on speed, batch processing, and preserving file integrity without requiring a full-fledged image editor.
As photographers know all too well, image libraries can be a lot to keep track of. Between internal storage and external drives, sometimes many of them, finding exactly the right photo or folder can be very frustrating. Photographer and cinematographer Paul Kothe agrees, so he built an app to solve the problem once and for all.
VSCO has announced a new professional photo delivery app, VSCO Galleries, which is launching next week during WPPI in Las Vegas. The new app has been built from the ground up for photographers who want to deliver photos to clients in a clean, straightforward, and professional way. VSCO Galleries aims to help photographers make a strong first impression when delivering photos to their clients.
Adobe today added new camera and lens support to Adobe Camera Raw, Lightroom, and Lightroom Classic. Newly supported cameras include the OM System OM-3 Astro and the Ricoh GR IV Monochrome, while new lens support includes the latest lenses from Canon, Leica, and more.
Snapseed suddenly updated its app last year after years of silence, and it doesn't seem like the team is done. Today, it pushed an update to the iOS app that adds a camera to the interface; it's the first time Snapseed has ever had a camera. For reference, it launched in 2011 and was acquired by Google back in 2012.