Software News

For serious photographers, the software you choose for a photographic workflow falls into good, better, and best buckets. The “good” bucket includes fairly mundane tools for basic image management, while “better” goes the extra step of providing image correction options and filters. The “best” tools provide tethered-shot features and robust metadata editing functions. At these upper ranks, the best software seems to predict your every move, mostly because the software developers are photo enthusiasts and understand real photographic needs.

Phase One’s Capture One Pro 6 falls into this “best” category. In many ways, it even beats out Adobe Photoshop CS5 in that there seems to be a professional-grade feature under every drop-down menu and in every dialog box. The editing functions pale in comparison to Photoshop, but as we’ve all learned, if you set up the shot perfectly on location you might not need to do a lot of editing later.

Phase One today released Capture One Pro 10, a powerful upgrade to their Raw conversion and image-editing software package. Designed for pros and amateurs alike, this new version offers an improved user interface, enhanced performance, and compatibility with over 400 digital cameras.

Phase One released its new Capture One Pro 9 imaging software this morning. The updated software, which is known for its tethered shooting capability, its quality Raw imaging conversion, and advanced image editing tools, is the follow up to Capture One Pro 8 from 2014.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of their AI-powered photo-management software, Excire is sponsoring People in Focus, a free-to-enter contest for people of all skill levels. The contest started June 1, 2025 and runs through June 30th. A total of $7000 in cash prizes is being awarded.

That's a serious purse, but what makes People in Focus unique is the umpiring. The competition is being judged entirely by artificial intelligence.

Exceptional photographic software reveals its true nature over time. In the case of Photo Mechanic—which is a pro-level image organizing tool from Camera Bits—there are seemingly insignificant features that provide a smooth workflow, especially for photo journalists working with IPTC data.

Photokina 2014 in Germany has been covered widely on the Internet already—including our own extensive reporting on the show on Shutterbug.com—so there’s no need for me to rehash the major announcements from the event, such as the latest full-frame cameras from Canon and Nikon and the like. My photo report here is aimed at sharing some wider ranging thoughts and perspectives on this important biennial show and what it told us about photography today and where it might be heading tomorrow.

Adobe just added several exciting new features to the beta version of Photoshop. The most significant is Firefly-powered Generative Fill, the ability to select any item in an image and replace it with a different object based on the prompt you type into a dialog box.