ArtCraft: Free Adobe Alternative, But Can You Trust It?

You've no doubt seen ArtCraft all over the internet over the last week or so; it's a set of free apps that look an awful lot like Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere and the rest of Adobe's apps, and they've all been built using AI. There's been video after video, article after article and thousands of comments cheering it on, but having read through a lot of it, there are a few things I haven't seen anybody mention.

Before I get into it, I want to be upfront about where I'm coming from. I do occasional work for Adobe, recording tutorials for Adobe Learn, presenting and so on, and I use Creative Cloud every single day. I also use Claude, which is the AI that was used to build these apps, and I love it. I'm editing more and more of my videos in DaVinci Resolve rather than Premiere Pro, and I love that too, so I'm all for competition. I just want you to know where I stand so you can weigh up what I've got to say.

What's actually happened

A software developer called Brandon Thomas has released seven free apps under the ArtCraft name. PhotoCraft is his version of Photoshop, LightCraft is Lightroom and FilmCraft is Premiere, and there are versions of Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects and Acrobat as well. He says he built them using Anthropic's AI, Claude, and they're open source, which means the code is published for anyone to look at.

The reaction has been huge. GitHub is where software developers share their code, and people can give a project a star, a bit like a like on YouTube. Eleven days after it all came out, PhotoCraft alone had 44,000 of them. He also tried posting about it on the Adobe Reddit forum, but understandably that post didn't stay up for very long.

Early, very early

What's had a lot less attention is how finished it is. By PhotoCraft's own roadmap, it's at about 25% to 35% of what a professional needs for daily work. Only two of the seven apps are even labelled as early alpha; the rest are still in development. When it launched he promised it would match Adobe completely within a month, and when people started pointing out what was missing, that became 99% within months.

It's also not trying to hide where it comes from. PhotoCraft's own website describes it as "the open-source image editor you already know how to use", and one look at the screenshot tells you why: the menus, the tools down the side, the Curves panel, the Layers panel. You already know how to use it because it's been made to look like Photoshop, and that's the whole pitch.

What can Adobe actually do about it?

I'm not a lawyer, so take this as my understanding rather than legal advice. Copyright protects the actual code, the written instructions that make a program work, and things like the artwork and the icons, but it doesn't protect an idea or what a program does. If he really hasn't copied any of Adobe's code, which is what he says, a copyright case isn't straightforward.

An intellectual property attorney called Steve Hanson made a really good point about this in [his own video]([FILL IN: link to Steve Hanson's video]). He reckons copyright probably isn't where Adobe would go at all, and that it's more likely to be the contract, the terms you agree to when you sign up. Section 17 of Adobe's terms says, in Adobe's own words, that they don't allow you to recreate, or attempt to recreate, their products.

Then there's the look. There's something called trade dress in the US, and passing off here in the UK, which is about whether a product looks so much like another that people could be confused about who made it. The menus, the panels and even the keyboard shortcuts match Photoshop, and that's exactly the area people are pointing at.

So far Adobe hasn't said a word, and there's good reason it might stay that way. Taking a free, open-source project to court would hand it more publicity than it could ever buy, and the code is already out there for anyone to copy; people already have, and there's another free editor built on PhotoCraft's code. Even if ArtCraft stopped tomorrow, the apps wouldn't disappear.

I remember when Affinity Photo first came out and everyone was saying how close it was to Photoshop, in how it looked and what it could do. We all kind of thought something was going to happen, but nothing did, and today Affinity is owned by Canva and it's free. It's going to be really interesting to see what happens with this one.

Why he built it

This is the part I find really interesting. He's said Adobe charged him its cancellation fee more than once, and in his own words, "They charged me the 'cancellation fee' on multiple occasions and I've hated them ever since." Elsewhere he said he'd been "bit by the dark pattern cancellation fee one too many times."

So this didn't start as a better way to edit photographs; it started with someone who hates Adobe.

I do understand the frustration. In March this year Adobe agreed to a $150 million settlement in the US over how it sold and cancelled Creative Cloud subscriptions. Half of that was a penalty and half was free services for customers, and Adobe didn't admit any wrongdoing. Plenty of people have felt exactly what he felt, and Adobe brought a lot of this on itself, but I'd want to know a lot more about someone who built software out of a grudge before I put it on my computer, let alone gave them my card details.

Who's behind it

Brandon Thomas is a software developer with around 15 years' experience, and he's worked at Square, the payments company. Before ArtCraft he was CEO of a company called Storyteller.ai, and ArtCraft's contact email still goes to Storyteller. Storyteller's best-known product is FakeYou, a site for generating the voices of celebrities and characters using AI, and in 2022 Italy's data protection authority opened an inquiry into it because it could reproduce the voices of public figures, including Italy's Prime Minister, from whatever you typed in.

ArtCraft itself started out as a tool for making and editing AI-generated images and video, and that's still what it's selling.

How it's paid for

The apps are free. What ArtCraft sells is credits for AI image and video generation on a monthly subscription, at $10, $35 or $60 a month, using AI models from Google, OpenAI and others, including Google's Nano Banana, the same model Adobe has put into Lightroom's Prompt to Edit.

So a project that launched with the message of no more subscriptions is paid for by a subscription. To be fair, the site does say you can use the apps without paying, and it's actually a very similar idea to Affinity now, where the app is free and you pay Canva for the AI features. The difference is who's behind it. With Affinity it's Canva, a company you can look up and hold to account; here, it's someone who's told us he hates the company he's copying.

A question if you're worried about AI

There's been a lot of anger about AI in Adobe's apps, and about AI being trained on work photographers and artists never agreed to. I totally understand that; I've shared videos about my own concern over too much AI in Lightroom and Photoshop, and plenty of you have told me how you feel about it.

If that's you, what do you make of this? A set of apps built by AI, copying Adobe's software and paid for by selling access to AI image generators. I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm just asking whether it sits differently with you because it's aimed at Adobe.

A link versus an install

There's one more thing about all of this I just can't get past. We're all really careful about clicking a link in an email we're not sure about, yet installing software gives it far more access to your computer than clicking a link ever could, and thousands of people have installed this without a second thought. That's the bit I can't get my head around. Why would you be more careful with a link than with a program you're putting on your computer?

When you install software from someone you know nothing about, can you be 100% sure what's in it? I'm not saying there's anything in it that shouldn't be there, and there's no evidence of that at all, but can you be completely sure? I couldn't.

When someone's prepared to go this far over a grudge with a company, building copies of seven of its apps and giving them away, I'd also want to know how they'd treat me, someone they've never met, if I ever fell out with them or if they ever needed something from me.

Would I install it?

No, not as it stands. It's early alpha software, it's not clear what it'll look like in a year's time, and the person behind it has told us he hates the company he's copying. That doesn't mean he's done anything wrong, but think about what's on the computer you'd be installing it on. For me it's every photograph I've ever taken, but it's also my emails, my passwords and the same computer I log into my bank on. That's my whole day-to-day life, not just my pictures, and I'd want to know a lot more history behind something before I gave it that kind of access, and well before I handed over a card number.

If you're curious, there's a version that runs in your web browser, so you can have a look without installing anything at all.

Competition is good

I'm all for competition. Look at what's happened with cameras over the last few years, Canon, Nikon and Sony pushing each other, or Apple and Android. That's when we win, with better products and better prices.

You're free to use whatever you want; it's your choice, not mine. I only use what's fit for purpose, whoever makes it, which is exactly why I've moved more and more of my video editing over to DaVinci Resolve. Affinity, DaVinci Resolve and Capture One are all really good alternatives to Adobe and I'd encourage anyone to look at them. The difference is that there's a company behind each one with a history that you can look up, and that you can hold to account if something goes wrong.

Five questions before you install anything

Whatever you're thinking of installing, ArtCraft or anything else, these are the five things I'd ask first.

• Who's behind it, and what have they made before?

• How is it paid for? If it's free, how is the person making it earning a living?

• Is the installer signed by a named publisher? Your computer will usually warn you if it isn't, and that warning is worth reading rather than clicking straight past.

• Where do your files and your card details go?

• If it disappears tomorrow, can you get your work back out of it?

If you can answer all five and you're happy with the answers, go for it. If you can't, I'd wait.

First Time EVER Photographing Wildlife 🦅

Now my new kit has arrived I've been out the past couple of days to start getting familair with it, and I'm genuinely loving it.

Saturday I photographed the Spring Tide and then on Sunday morning I headed out early with my mate, Ben Kapur, to photograph wildlife down at a local reservoir.

Once we got to the hide, Ben checked over my camera (Canon R5 II) and helped set it up for Bird Photography, dialing in a bunch of settings, assigning Fn buttons and dials to perform specific task quickly without looking away from the 'action'.

These he saved to a custom mode and then it was a case of me familiarising myself with where controls had been assigned.

In no time at all the Kingfisher arrived. WOW! The 2nd time in my life ever to see one, and this one was up close. At one point it flew right past the window we were sat at in the hide and landed on the roof above us.

It then flew down onto a branch at the waters edge whereupon I started taking photographs and listening to Ben as he read the Bird's Body language telling me when it was about to dive ... and sure enough it did. I managed to get shots off including using the pre capture function, but for these my ISO was too high, and an Egret decided to Photo Bomb 😃 ... so I won't be working on any of those. The light first thing was quite dull and uninteresting too.

As the morning went on though, I became more and more familiar with what to do and when, practicing on Herons and Egrets as they calmy paced around; Gulls too as they flew around.

Having NEVER done this before I was like an excited kid at Christmas seeing how incredible the technology is at recognising the subject and locking on with the focus and tracking. Pre Capture too ... Amazing.

Can't wait to get out again and again, putting in the practice at the reservoir, the back garden, down at Seaton Wetlands. This is so much fun and I LOVE that there is always something new to learn.

KIT
Canon R5 II
Canon EF 400mm f/2.8 IS III USM
EF to RF Converter
1.4x Extender

Stop Taking Photographs | Vincent Versace

I was joined on Sunday Night Live by my friend Vincent Versace, and if you caught him the first time round you’ll know what to expect; it’s an open, honest conversation that ends up being incredibly motivating without either of us really trying. Plenty of you asked to have him back, so here’s the full chat along with some of the things that have stuck with me since.

Don’t pigeonhole yourself

I started by asking Vincent whether photographers should pick a niche, because looking through his work for the promo there’s portraits, wildlife, still life and everything in between. His answer was that if you want to master something you should master all of it, and he told a story about a friend from grad school who learned to play almost every instrument in the orchestra because he wanted to be a conductor, and the symphony was his instrument.

Vincent shoots his landscapes like portraits and his portraits like landscapes, and he puts it this way: if you only do one thing, that thing becomes a groove, then a rut, then a hole, then a grave, and then you’re wondering why nobody’s hiring you anymore.

That landed with me this week. I’ve gone full circle back to Canon, and I was out on Sunday morning with my friend Ben photographing birds for the very first time. I was like a kid in a sweet shop, and I genuinely felt like I was doing portraits of the birds. Vincent’s response was simple; a portrait shows the best of a person or a thing, so why should a bird or a flower be any different?

Just take the pictures

Vincent got hooked at seven, watching his uncle, a wedding photographer, print a picture in the darkroom. He sold his first photograph at nine and shot his first wedding at sixteen, and his rule hasn’t changed since: if it looks cool, take a picture of it.

He was teaching a workshop in Maine the week we spoke, and he told me he wasn’t going to tell his students that autumn colour is one of the hardest things to photograph, because if they don’t know it’s hard they won’t make it hard. He reckons he’s shot more bad photographs than my entire audience put together, but he just doesn’t show them, and that’s where his line “from fertiliser, flowers grow” comes from. You have to shoot an awful lot of rubbish to get to the gems.

The bit I keep coming back to is letting the picture take you rather than you taking the picture. If you’re busy working out what it is in the moment, the moment’s gone.

Let the camera do the work

On the technical side, Vincent believes every decision about a photograph happens at the moment of capture, and the more you understand about editing, the better those decisions get. However, the aim is for all that knowledge to sit in your unconscious mind so you’re not juggling it while you shoot. He knows how to focus manually and how to expose, but he hands all of it to the camera because it can track an eye faster than he ever could, which frees him up to pay attention to what’s happening in front of him.

He also made the point that the word amateur comes from the Latin for doing something simply for the love of it, and that’s where your head should be. He’d far rather be an amateur than an expert, and his childhood joke book definition of an expert had me laughing; “ex” is a has-been and a “spurt” is a drip under pressure.

Art, and making a picture

Vincent thinks photography is the only art form where owning the instrument makes you a practitioner; nobody buys a cello and calls themselves a cellist. He doesn’t call himself an artist either. To him, art is something other people accuse your work of being, and until then it’s expression, a postcard from the vacation of his life.

I’ve always struggled with calling myself an artist, so it was good to hear someone put it that way.

I also asked him about saying “make a picture” rather than “take a picture”, because when I first heard it years ago I thought it sounded pretentious, but my view’s changed. The way Vincent sees it, the lens is his brush, the sensor is the canvas, the file is the sheet music and the final image is the symphony. Pictures don’t come out of the camera finished, and as he put it, the boon of digital is that you have total control, and the bane of digital is that you have total control.

Remembering Jay Maisel

We lost Jay Maisel back in August. I was lucky enough to meet Jay a few times at the conferences Vincent and I were teaching at in the States, but the two of them were close friends for 37 years, ever since they ended up sitting next to each other on a panel.

Vincent described his most perfect day as a photographer, spent with Jay in New York. It started with cigars at half eight in the morning, and at one point Jay stood next to a rubbish bin, looking from the bin to Vincent and back again, while Vincent walked past it three times thinking it was just a bin. Back at Jay’s building, Jay showed him a frame of blurred colour, shadow and geometric shapes, and it was that bin.

Later, sitting in Jay’s kitchen on the sixth floor with the Empire State Building in the window at sunset, a white “I ♥ NY” bag floated up and hovered in the frame, moving from spot to spot as if it were asking where they wanted it. Both cameras were five floors down. They called it the cyber chrome that got away, a picture taken with your mind, and it was a running joke between them for 20 years.

When I asked what Jay saw that the rest of us don’t, Vincent said he was always childlike and had the ability to slow down to the speed of life. Jay trained as a painter under Josef Albers at Yale, and for him gesture came before everything. That’s also Vincent’s take on black and white; it works when the colour gets in the way of the gesture, rather than being about contrast for its own sake.

Jay’s mantras still come into Vincent’s head when he’s shooting. Be taken by the picture. Photography is unrequited love, and Jay’s own line was that he fell in love a thousand times a day, usually for 1/125th of a second. Fill the frame and own every millimetre of it; Jay never cropped. He treated light like a solid object that the subject interrupts, and he’d take a line of washing in beautiful light over the Taj Mahal in poor light every time.

About ten years ago Vincent was ready to walk away from photography altogether, and Jay told him that if he’d already shot that tree, he should shoot it again, because he’d see it differently. Vincent has photographed the Golden Gate Bridge for over 40 years, and while plenty of those pictures are clichés, plenty of them are completely unique because he kept going back. In his words, mastery is the variation of repetition over time.

Photography today

Asked whether he’d want to be starting out now, Vincent gave the same advice he’s given for 20 years: consider a career in plumbing. If you can’t do anything else, though, keep the love going, and if it stops making you happy, find the joy again or step away and come back when you can.

His biggest sorrow for people coming up today is that there are no heroes anymore, just influencers. He grew up studying the greats and living and breathing Jay’s work, whereas now we scroll past images so fast we never let any of them take us. For Vincent, the power of a still photograph is that it freezes the moment that took the photographer, and AI images feel sad to him because there’s no feeling in them.

I’d been thinking about the guy who vibe coded his own version of the Adobe apps, and it made me realise that the future isn’t really the editing software, because that will always change; it’s the craft. Vincent agreed, and he’s not anti-AI either. He uses the AI remove tools because they do a better job of cleaning up an image, and he’s used generative tools to rescue a couple of soft film scans, but he doesn’t make AI pictures. When I asked whether people writing prompts are photographers, he said no; he thinks they’re authors.

Updated Reflection Removal, But is it BETTER?

On the 29th September Adobe released Lightroom 9.6 and Lightroom Classic 15.6, and one of the things in the update was a set of improvements to reflection removal. Adobe's wording talks about cleaner results on complex surfaces, with fewer smudges and ghosting artefacts when you're removing reflections from windows, glass and water, which sounds great, but I think it's fair to say my experience of it up until now has been a little bit hit and miss. When it works it works incredibly well, but there are pictures where you'd think it should do the job and it just doesn't.

So I wanted to see how the update copes, and then show you something else that's now in Lightroom which could be a workaround for the times it doesn't. I haven't tried it on water yet; I wanted to see how it got on with ordinary reflections in windows first.

Where it works

The first picture I tried is one where the window is the dominant part of the scene, with me clearly reflected in the glass. In the Remove section on the right-hand side you've got Reflections, so I ticked Apply, using Preview so I wasn't waiting around too long, and after a few seconds it had done a really good job. Drag the Amount slider all the way to the left and you can see the reflection, drag it all the way to the right and it's gone completely.

That's the version of this tool people get excited about, and rightly so.

Where it doesn't

The next picture is me standing outside a gallery photographing it, and again I'm very clearly visible in the window along with plenty of other things being reflected. Same steps, same few seconds' wait, and nothing really happened, which is odd, because the window is still the main part of the picture.

The third was outside my friend Nicola Catherine's fashion knitwear and art studio, with me reflected in the window again. This time it looked really good at first, until you start looking properly; around the picture frame and up towards the top you can still see the reflection, and with the Amount slider dragged across I could still make out my teeth, my beard and my glasses.

That's where the tool is right now, and I'd fully expect it to keep getting better. The question is what you do in the meantime when it won't play ball.

Prompt to Edit

I've previously done this in Photoshop with a selection and Generative Fill, but there's another new addition in Lightroom which I think works as a workaround for now. Down at the bottom of the right-hand panel there's a small icon for Prompt to Edit. My first thought when I saw it was that I didn't really want that kind of thing in Lightroom, but Lightroom has a lot of users with different wants and needs, and it'll suit plenty of them. It's early access at the moment, so this isn't the finished version.

It works the way prompting does in any generative AI tool. There are presets for things like fixing dust and scratches, colour restoration and black and white colourisation, plus effects such as adding dense fog or replacing the sky, and you can type your own prompt and pick earlier ones from a history list underneath. The important part is the note at the top saying the result is saved as a new DNG, because what it's actually doing is regenerating the entire image to make whatever change you've asked for.

Right now the only models on offer are Nano Banana 2 at 2K, which uses 20 credits, or Nano Banana 2 at 4K, which uses 30, and there's no preview, so you don't get to see whether it's going to work before the credits are spent. I'd really hope more models appear once it's out of early access, because there are others that are better at working on just part of an image while holding on to the original.

Trying it on three windows

The picture I used has three windows with some pretty severe reflections, and the big white patch in the right-hand one is my softbox from when I lit the portrait. I typed "remove the reflections from each of the three windows", hit Generate, and after a short wait a second file appeared next to the original Fuji raw file, with "-prompt" added to the file name.

The reflections were gone, but flicking between the two with the arrow keys the saturation had clearly gone up, and in the right-hand window, where you couldn't see anything at all through the softbox, it had simply made something up. For your own pictures that might be fine, but if you're trying to keep any integrity in the image I don't imagine a client would be too keen.

So I deleted that one and tried again, adding "do not change the colour, do not increase the contrast, keep the original contents exactly the same" to the prompt and choosing 4K this time. The windows came out really well, but the saturation was still up, and zooming in showed the bigger issue; even at 4K it's a much lower resolution than the original photograph, and a lot of the lettering had changed. The menu was nonsense and the Costa sign now said "burned", which isn't the best advert if you're selling coffee.

Bringing it into Photoshop

However, all is not lost, because you only need the generated file for the glass. I selected the original and the new DNG in Lightroom, holding Shift to get both, then went to File, Edit In, Open as Layers in Photoshop.

In the Layers panel the difference in size between the two thumbnails is obvious straight away, which is a very visual way of seeing how much resolution you lose. With the generated layer on top, I selected both layers and went to Edit, Auto-Align Layers, left it on Auto and clicked OK, and it lined the two up really well. A quick crop took care of the edges, along with a little bit of the softbox showing in the top right corner.

Then I held Option (Alt on Windows) and clicked the layer mask icon, which adds a black mask and hides the generated layer completely, and painted the windows back in with a white brush. I nudged the brush hardness up so it stayed tidy against the window frames, because a very soft brush spills over them.

This is where you get to choose what you keep. One sign had changed colour, so I left the original there. The wording at the top of the TripAdvisor sign had gone a bit odd, so I painted that back with black. The menu had turned into a strange made-up language, so I kept the original there too; there's still a touch of reflection on it, but it's not dominant. In the left-hand window a chalkboard had vanished while a hanging decoration had been kept, which is pretty clever, but it's artistic licence, and the right-hand window is completely invented. That's usable for your own work, but for a client I very much doubt they'd want new things appearing behind the glass.

Fixing the Costa sign

The Costa sign was a different problem, because masking couldn't sort it without the colour shifting, so the wording itself needed changing. I added a new blank layer, drew a selection around the word with the Rectangular Marquee tool and used Generative Fill from the contextual taskbar with Firefly Image 5, which is the one to pick here; it's designed to edit while preserving detail. I typed "change to served", and it swapped the word over in what looks like the same font, which is really useful.

The finished picture is the full resolution original everywhere except the glass, which comes from the regenerated file, and flicking between before and after it's not bad at all. Ideally you'd do all of this with Reflection Removal inside Lightroom, and I'm sure that's where it's heading, but as things stand in October 2026, with Prompt to Edit in early access and reflection removal still a bit hit and miss, it's another good option to have for the pictures the built-in tool can't manage yet.

Are we thinking WRONG about AI Editing?

My last two videos had ChatGPT editing my photographs, first in Lightroom, where it went through a folder of my own edited pictures, worked out my style and then edited a raw file the way I would, and then in Photoshop, where it used Photoshop's own tools to remove a colour cast, add a long exposure effect to a sky and do a cutout, hair included.

In both of them it didn't generate a new picture. It moved the same sliders and used the same tools that you and I would, and every one of those adjustments was still there to change afterwards.

The comments on those videos have been brilliant and they've really made me think, but one kept coming up in different words, and the gist of it was this: so now every picture is going to look like yours.

When you watch what ChatGPT is doing in those videos, it's an understandable thing to think. I just don't think it's right, so rather than argue about it, I decided to test it, and the video above is the result.

Putting it to the test

I gave ChatGPT a folder of my portraits, with my edits on them, and asked it to work out how I edit. Then I gave it the raw file of a portrait I'd already edited myself and asked it to edit that in my style.

I'm not going to go through what I did to mine; the two results are side by side in the video, so have a look and see if you can tell which is which before I give it away.

Here's the thing, though. Whichever one you prefer, they both look like one of my portraits, and that's not because of the edit, it's because I took the picture. Everything that makes it look like one of mine happened before the shutter was pressed, and ChatGPT had none of that to work with; it just had my raw file.

The edit is the icing on the cake

The edit is the part of the process we can see on screen, so it's easy to think that's what makes a picture yours, but it's only one part of a much bigger process. I really enjoy editing, and it gives a picture its final look, but for me it's the icing on the cake.

The big part is what goes on between my ears: how I think about a picture before I take it and how I compose it. With a portrait, it's how the person looks in front of the camera and whether they're relaxed or not. With a seascape, it's what goes in the frame and what doesn't.

None of that is in the edit, so even if somebody had the exact colouring, contrast and tonality I use, their pictures still wouldn't look like mine. They'd look like theirs, with my colouring on them.

We can all buy the same kit, spend the same money on the same camera and lens, stand in exactly the same spot and point it at the same thing, and the pictures still won't look the same. There'll be something in each one that's uniquely yours, because of what you like and what you don't, how you were brought up and everything you've looked at over the years. All of that goes into a photograph, and none of it comes out of an edit.

An opinion, or a misunderstanding?

People have their own opinions about AI, and that's a good thing; having an opinion is part of being human, not something artificial. Sometimes an opinion just isn't right, though, and I know that sounds a strange thing to say. The idea that everybody's pictures are going to end up looking the same isn't really an opinion at all. It's a misunderstanding of what photography is.

Using the software, not replacing the picture

That's also why the way ChatGPT did those edits interests me so much. There's a difference between asking an AI to generate a new version of your picture and having it use the same software you and I would. When a picture's generated, you hand it over and get a new one back. When the AI works the sliders and the masks itself, you get your own raw file back at full quality, with every adjustment still there to change.

It's a bit like the difference between someone redrawing your picture and someone sitting next to you showing you what they did with it. Both have their place, but they're very different things.

Two very different photographers

Where it gets interesting is who all of this is for, because there are definitely two different audiences. Take Adobe as an example. On one side they've got working photographers, people with clients and deadlines, editing a shoot with hundreds of pictures that all need the same look. On the other they've got enthusiasts, people who take pictures because they just love doing it.

For the working photographer, imagine being able to hand an AI an actual part of your process. I don't mean something that makes a new picture; I mean something that applies the same look to a whole set of images inside the software, moving the sliders and making the masks without touching the originals, so you can go in and change whatever you want afterwards. That could be a massive time saver.

The hobbyist is a different story, because for them editing isn't a job to get through. They go out and take their pictures because they enjoy it, then come home and edit them with no rush at all, sitting in a room with a bit of music on and maybe a nice glass of something. For them the editing is part of the thing they love, and a one-click fix isn't for them.

However, some of what AI brings is. The Remove Tool in Photoshop has been a massive benefit; jobs that used to take an age now take moments. Anything that helps with selections, hair and fine cutouts especially, is going to be a huge help as well. None of that takes the enjoyment away. It takes away the tedious bits and leaves more time for the parts you actually enjoy.

How I use it

I use AI every single day, for the admin, the research and the writing that goes with running everything on my own. I'm a one-man band, so that's a lot of work it takes off my desk, and I'm not worried in the slightest that other people's pictures are going to look like mine.

What it gives me is time, and that matters to me more than anything, because I absolutely love doing what I do. I got into this creative world because I love being creative, and I love the freedom of it and the escapism it gives me. I don't want anything to replace that. If anything I want more of it, which is exactly how I'm using AI; it takes care of the jobs I'd rather not be doing and gives me back more time with a camera in my hand.

The mood of the moment

When I gave ChatGPT my Lightroom and Photoshop to use, it didn't edit my pictures exactly the way I would. It can pick up the things I tend to do, but when I'm editing I'm very much in the mood of the moment, chopping and changing as I go, and that freedom of just going with it is a big part of why I enjoy editing at all. AI doesn't know the mood or the feeling I want to give a particular picture, and creating that is what I've always loved.

The Photoshop side was different, because those were tasks. The colour cast, the sky and the hair cutout were jobs where I knew what the finished result needed to be, and what I found really interesting was the thought of handing those kinds of tasks to an AI to do by hand, using the software the same way I would, so I've got more time for the creative side. It was an experiment, but it's certainly one that's got me thinking.

Winchester, History and a Brilliant Worldwide Photo Walk

On Saturday the 3rd October I led the Winchester walk for this year's Worldwide Photo Walk, sponsored by Adobe, and what an amazing day it turned out to be.

An early start and a proper breakfast

I arrived early with my wife Anne and my great friend Brian Dukes, and we sat down for a bit of breakfast before anything got going, and from there it was over to the Guildhall to meet everyone. The turnout was great, with more people turning up on the day than had registered, which is just so good to see. We got everyone together outside for a group photo and then we were off on the walk.

A little bit of planning

Ahead of the day I'd put together a PDF for everyone with points of interest, a bit of a route, some safety notices and the refreshment breaks, along with my phone number should anybody go astray.

The plan was a loop of about a mile and a half from the Guildhall, down past King Alfred's statue to the City Mill, along the Weirs by the River Itchen, past Wolvesey Castle and up through Kingsgate and the Cathedral Close, before heading back along the High Street by the Buttercross. None of it is complicated, but when you've got a big group spreading out along narrow streets and riverside paths, it helps everyone to know there's a rough plan, somewhere to grab a coffee and a number to ring if you wander off chasing a shot.

My favourite capture from the day taken with my Fujifilm X100 VI fited with a 1/8th Black Mist Filter

So much history

What a fabulous location Winchester is; the whole place was just fantastic, with so much history everywhere you point a camera. We didn't go inside the cathedral, but we spent some time outside taking pictures, and it's just an amazing building.

One of the lovely things about the day was having people in the group who were local, because they could point us in the direction of certain things we'd otherwise have walked straight past. That's the sort of thing you can't put in a PDF, and it made a real difference.

Three hours that flew by

It was just so good to see so many people out on a glorious day, chatting and taking photos and really clearly enjoying themselves. Three hours flew by.

Food, bikes and a bit of Lightroom

Afterwards we headed for some food at the South Downs Social, a bike-themed café in Winchester, and we all gathered together on tables upstairs. We talked about the day and what everyone's up to, but we also went through a little bit of Lightroom editing on the mobile phone, which felt like the right way to round things off; you've just spent a morning taking the photos, so it's nice to sit down together and see what you can do with them.

It was just a fantastic day. Winchester is definitely a location I'm going to go back to, and the day was so successful and felt so good and positive that it makes me want to go out and do more of these.

Thank you

A huge thank you to everybody that came along. Here's just a selection of some of the photos from the day, and I'm also posting my keeper image as well.

Landscape vs Wildlife Photography: What Changes? | Ben Kapur

Sunday Night Live is back, and I couldn't have asked for a better guest to start the new series than my friend Ben Kapur. The replay is above, and here's a flavour of what we talked about.

I've only known Ben for a few months. We met on the Wex Summer Roadshow, where Ben was filming all the promo, and it was our mutual friend Mark Baber who introduced us. It turned out we live about fifteen minutes from each other and had no idea, and after a five hour drive up to Manchester together that felt like twenty minutes because we didn't stop talking, we've been good friends ever since.

Failing photography, and what came next

Ben grew up in Lyme Regis, and like a lot of us he started out with a GoPro at around 14, filming mountain biking and jumping into the sea. When it came to choosing his AS levels, photography was the only option left that wasn't biology or chemistry, so he took it, then dropped out in year 13 and, in his words, failed it.

He told us he could never get his head round aperture, shutter speed and ISO back then, and the structure of the course didn't help, because just as he was starting to understand what an ND filter did for a long exposure, they'd moved on to something else.

The best bit is what happened years later. Ben's younger brother went to the same school, and his tutor turned out to be Ben's old photography teacher, who asked what Ben was up to now. When he heard Ben was a full-time photographer, his answer was that there was no way. I'll be honest, I loved that.

Photography properly took hold when Ben was 19 and met his fiancée Primrose, an actor and influencer who needed photos for her blog and Instagram, and whose dad is a photographer as well. Taking her pictures got him behind a camera regularly, and living on the Jurassic Coast did the rest, because when you've got compositions like that on your doorstep, landscape photography is hard to resist.

The Storm of Storr

In 2020 Ben won Scotland's Photo of the Year with a picture he called the Storm of Storr, and the story behind it is a good one.

It was February 2020, just before lockdown, and Ben and his friend Paul had driven up to the Old Man of Storr on the Isle of Skye. It's about an hour's walk up to the viewpoint, and it was raining at the bottom and snowing further up. Paul sensibly sheltered behind a rock, but Ben carried on over the brow of the hill into sideways snow and something like 70 mile an hour winds.

He lasted a couple of minutes before deciding it was daft to be up there on his own, and on the way back down, with the snow freezing to his glasses so he could barely see, he just kept the camera pointed at the Old Man with the autofocus on and fired away. That's the frame that won.

He was shooting on a Lumix S1R at the time, back when he was a Panasonic ambassador; something he gets a bit of stick for, having changed systems a few times since. I'm hardly in a position to comment on that, and as I said on the night, it's about what's fit for purpose.

Kingfishers, and a lens that's older than you'd think

Wildlife is where Ben switches off, and right now that means kingfishers. His idea of a day off is getting up early to go and photograph them, which I completely understand; a follower once told him to leave the camera at home on holiday, and as Ben said, he'd rather book a trip somewhere beautiful and take it with him.

What I really like is how he talks about wildlife sharpening everything else he does. You never know what you're going to get, and with something as quick as a kingfisher you can't be fumbling around for settings, so knowing the camera inside out becomes second nature, and that carries straight into his client work.

He's moved from Sony to Canon, now using the EOS R5 Mark II and the C50, and for the kingfishers he's using the older Canon EF 500mm f/4L IS II, adapted onto the R5 Mark II. He tried it, along with an EF 400mm f/2.8, when Dave, one of the photographers on one of his workshops, brought them along, and he couldn't see any difference in the autofocus compared with a native lens. For something like a third or a quarter of the price of the new RF version, he's getting the look that only a long prime gives you.

He also showed us a clip of a kingfisher landing and shaking off the water, caught with the R5 Mark II's pre-record. He hadn't pressed record when the bird came in; he pressed it afterwards, and the camera had kept the five seconds before. If you've ever sat waiting for something to arrive with the camera recording the whole time, you'll see why that's such a big deal.

Golden eagles at minus 35

Last December Ben went to Sweden with Jack Lodge, [FILL IN: check the spelling, Rhiannon Lawler?] and Paul, looking for golden eagles from hides built by Conny Lundström, who has spent years photographing them. With two brilliant wildlife photographers already there, Ben decided to shoot video instead, and the short film he made, which we played on the night, was shot in a single afternoon at minus 35.

He edits everything himself in DaVinci Resolve, and he made a point I think a lot of photographers will recognise; you can create so much emotion with video and music. He came back to the cabin that night feeling sorry for those eagles, out in that barren landscape trying to find food, and that's what he cut the film to show.

Video is now most of what Ben does, and he describes himself as a videographer and photographer, in that order. Automotive work makes up a big part of it, with clients including Carwow and work for Ferrari through Joe Hayes at Kindle Creative, and he doesn't niche; he does everything and anything, which is clearly working for him.

Speak to people

Two pieces of advice from Ben stood out. The first was about honeypot locations. He's shot the Cobb hundreds of times, and his view is that the conditions are never the same twice, so go and shoot Durdle Door or Corfe Castle as often as you like, because you're learning every time.

The second was his one piece of advice for anyone starting out, which was simply to speak to people. Ask the photographers you look up to how they did something, and ask if you can tag along. After one of his talks on the Wex Roadshow, a young woman asked him about getting into wedding photography; Ben happened to be shooting a wedding near her that weekend, so with the couple's blessing he invited her along to shoot alongside him, and she's since launched her own website and is booking weddings of her own.

When I asked what he'd tell his 14 year old self, his first answer was to buy Bitcoin. His proper answer was not to give up. Not long after the Storr picture, YouTube and brand work had turned photography into a chore, and he stepped away from it for six months while working in an office job.

He said he feels lucky to be doing what he does now, and I pushed back on that a little, because I don't think luck has much to do with it. Ben's out with a camera most mornings before most people are up, and given what that teacher told him, keeping going is advice he's clearly already taken.

You'll find Ben on Instagram and YouTube as:
youtube.com/benkapur
@benkapurphoto

ChatGPT Can Now ACTUALLY Use Photoshop, and It's Impressive

ChatGPT can now take control of your computer, moving the mouse, clicking and typing its way through a job the way you would, and the question I've been asked the most about it is whether it can use Photoshop. I've been testing it, and yes, it can.

What makes it interesting is that it isn't generating a new picture. It's working inside Photoshop with the same tools you and I use, which means everything it does is left as layers and masks you can go back into and adjust yourself, at full quality.

To see how far it could go, I gave it three jobs on three different pictures: fixing a colour cast, creating a long exposure sky, and cutting out hair, which is the thing I get asked about more than anything else in Photoshop.

How it works

I'm using ChatGPT 6 Astra on the high setting, in the Work section of the app. I type out what I want in plain language, send it, and it replies with what it intends to do. The first time it needs to use the computer it asks for permission, I click allow, and from then on it's hands off; I just sit back and watch it work.

With each job I asked it to keep everything non-destructive and editable, and not to save the file, just leave it as layers. You can see everything it does as it does it, and you can stop it at any point.

Fixing a colour cast

The first picture was a portrait of a biker with a definite colour cast, a slightly green and magenta look to it. I asked ChatGPT to look at the image, decide for itself which tools to use, and give me a neutral result.

It added a Curves adjustment layer, worked on the individual red, green and blue channels, and set the layer's blend mode to Color so that it only changed the colour and left the brightness and contrast alone, which is a genuinely sensible way to do it. The original background layer was untouched.

Turning the layer off and on, the cast was gone. It's not too bad at all, and I was quite impressed with that.

A long exposure sky

For the second one I wanted to step it up and see whether it could create an effect rather than make a correction. The picture was of my car on a very wet, stormy day, and I asked for the look of a ten second long exposure, with fast moving clouds coming over the top of us.

What really caught my attention was that it used the same technique I use for this myself. It selected the sky, put it onto its own layer, then converted that layer to a Smart Object before applying a Radial Blur, so the filter stays editable afterwards, which I thought was really clever.

Better still, it moved the centre of the blur. By default a Radial Blur spreads out from the middle of the picture, but ChatGPT pulled that point right down to the bottom, so the blur looks as if it's coming from the horizon and the clouds are streaming towards you. That's exactly the thinking you'd want.

I did have to stop it at the very end, because it was trying to save the file, but the effect itself was done.

Cutting out hair

The last job was the hardest, and the one I was most intrigued by. It's a picture of my friend Simon from a Viking shoot, on a grey background, but with lots of fine, loose flyaway hairs and fur cuffs on what he's wearing. I asked for the best cutout it could manage, body, hair and everything as one, output as a layer mask so it stays editable.

Watching this one was fascinating. It went into Select and Mask and used the Refine Edge Brush around the hair, and it kept switching the view mode to check its own work. At one point it reported that the fine strands were coming through, but that the black preview was showing grey left between the looser locks, so it went back to work on those and the fur before checking the final mask. Right at the end it even renamed the layer, which is maybe something all of us could learn from.

The result is a pretty good job. It picked up a lot of the fine hairs, it's a little smudgy in places, and there's some transparency through the fur. To judge it properly I put a solid colour fill layer behind Simon, a sky blue rather than anything too different from the grey he was photographed against.

The transparency in the fur is easily fixed. Duplicate the layer with its mask (Command or Ctrl + J) and the density builds up, then brush out any areas where the background starts to show through.

Doing the heavy lifting

It isn't perfect, and I don't expect this to be the end point, but as a way of doing the heavy lifting so you can go in and do the fine tuning yourself, it's pretty impressive. The colour correction was very good, the long exposure was really well done, and the hair cutout, the hardest of the three by some distance, was far better than I expected.

This is also the worst and the slowest it's ever going to be, given how quickly all of this is moving. I'll be doing a lot more testing, and one of the things I want to try is whether it can write down the steps it takes and grab screenshots as it goes, so you could almost create your own tutorials from it.

I Let ChatGPT Edit My Photos in Lightroom

The photograph in the video above was edited from start to finish in Lightroom, and I didn't make a single one of the adjustments. ChatGPT did. It used my Lightroom, moved the sliders, made the masks and took the picture from a slightly underexposed raw file to a finished edit, in my style.

ChatGPT has been able to use your computer for a while now. You give it permission and it takes over the mouse and keyboard and works through a job the way you would, opening apps, clicking and typing, and you can see everything it does as it does it and stop it at any point. With the recent update to Astra it's taken a real step up, which got me wondering whether it could actually edit a photograph. I don't mean generate a new picture; I mean sit inside Lightroom and edit a raw file with the same tools I use, and learn to do it the way I would.

Teaching it my style

The first job was getting it to understand how I edit. In Lightroom I set up an album called My Seascape Style with 11 of my images in it. Some still have their adjustments visible, masks included, so it could see exactly what I'd done. Others have the edit baked in, because I'd sent them over to Photoshop for some heavy lifting and brought them back, so there's nothing in the panels to look at, only the finished picture.

I used GPT-6 Astra with the effort level set to high. Day to day I find medium is plenty, but for studying my edits I wanted it to do an extra good job, even though it takes longer.

Then I told it what I wanted, dictated rather than typed because it's quicker. Look at every image in the album, study the adjustments, the masking, the detail and the colour grading, and try to understand not only what I'd done but why. For the images with nothing visible in the panels, study the mood and the atmosphere and the tonality instead, and work out what I'd have done to get there.

As soon as I sent it, ChatGPT asked for permission to use Adobe Lightroom, and I allowed it for that conversation. From then on you can watch it working away on its own, opening images and panels and looking around.

Watching it work

What really interested me was how far it went. It dived into the masking and looked at how I'd masked the rocks in the foreground and the adjustments I'd used to bring them out, which is exactly the kind of fiddly detail I'd half expected it to skip.

It posts updates as it goes, and part way through it had noticed that I recover the highlights and open up the shadows, then bring the depth back with control over the black point and selective detail. It had even picked up that I use one film-style profile for the warmer, pastel pictures and a different one for the cooler surf shots.

The whole thing took 11 minutes and 30 seconds. At the end it said it had reviewed the adjustments across all 11 images, including 27 local masks, saved an image-by-image reference of my style, and, thankfully, left my images unchanged.

Handing it a raw file

For the edit itself I picked an unedited raw file from the Local tab in Lightroom, a seascape that was slightly underexposed, which felt like a fair test. I told it to edit the image in my style using everything available in Lightroom, including the masking, the colour grading and denoise, then sat back with my arms folded to prove I wasn't touching anything.

When it finished, it described what it had done as my pastel seascape treatment: pink and lavender grading, cool water, deep textured rocks and luminous foam. The edit included four separate masks, denoise, selective sharpening, a custom tone curve, subtle grain and a vignette, plus a horizon correction.

What it actually did

Going through the Edit panel, it had chosen a profile and made adjustments right through the Light section. In the curve it had done one of the things I love to do, which is lift the blacks so they aren't a deep zero black, and it did that on a point curve. It used the colour mixer, and in the colour grading it worked on the shadows and midtones as well as the blending and balance. It used denoise too, and it built all those masks.

Hand on heart, that's pretty much how I would have edited it. I wouldn't leave it exactly as it is, I'd go in and tweak a few things, but it got me about 90% of the way there in roughly 10 minutes.

Try it with your own photos

If you'd like to give this a go, the detailed prompt I used is free to download. Head over to the classroom in my free Photography Community on Skool and you'll find it under YouTube download files:

https://www.skool.com/photography-community/about

Where this leaves us

There's been a lot of resistance to letting AI edit our photographs, and for good reason. When it generates the picture for you the quality drops, at the moment anyway, and you can't go back in and adjust what it's done. This is very different; it's using my software to make the same manual adjustments I'd make to my own raw files, at full quality, and every one of them can still be changed.

It's not something I'd do myself, because editing is a big part of how I make a picture mine and I just love the process. However, if you're new to editing and don't know where to start, or you know what you want but not how to get there, this is a bit like having someone who's really good with Lightroom sit next to you and show you what they'd do. You can watch every move it makes and undo any of them, and I think there's real potential in that as a way of learning.

Capture to Print: One-Light Complete Portrait Workflow

For the past three months I've been touring with Wex Photo Video around the UK on their Summer Roadshow, showing how I take portraits with minimal kit in limited space. I came away with portraits I'm really happy with from every date, but there was one look in particular I was asked about more than any other, so I asked my friend Michael if he'd sit for me and we went outside with one small flash to make it again.

The video above goes through the whole thing, from the shoot, through every step of the edit in Lightroom and Photoshop, to a finished print. Here's an overview of what's in it.

One small flash, outdoors

The idea is simple. Before the flash comes into it at all, I set the camera so that it doesn't see any ambient light; take a picture and you get a black screen. That way the only light in the final shot is the light I put there.

Outdoors in bright sun that takes a bit more doing than it does in a store. I ended up at f/16, which was as far as the lens would go, around ISO 125 and 1/250th of a second, keeping within the flash sync speed rather than reaching for high speed sync or ND filters. I did wonder whether a 100 watt second light could cope with sun that bright, but it wasn't a problem.

The kit was:

• the Westcott FJ100 on power 9, so pretty much full power

• a 15 inch octa with the grid fitted

• a pistol grip handle to hold it steady

• the camera on a tripod

• a reflector just below chest level

The camera goes on a tripod so Michael has one fixed point to look at, rather than following me around as I move, and I trust the eye autofocus to nail the focus so I don't need to be right behind it.

How the light falls

I raise the light nice and high and get Michael to lean forward a little towards the camera. Because of the grid, the light doesn't go everywhere; it comes down and skips across the front of his face, and it doesn't spill onto the background, which I wanted to keep dark.

What I really like about it is that the light is so directional you get shadow either side of it, so it's almost like having a strip of light running down the front of the face. It's a look I definitely want to work more on.

The one thing that made the biggest difference was the reflector. Flat and horizontal, it did very little for the eyes. Lift the far end so it's angled up towards him and the light bounces back into his face, and suddenly there's plenty of detail in the eyes to work with.

The edit in Lightroom

Only one job happens in Lightroom, and that's the eyes. I use masking to select the iris and pupil, finesse the mask with the feather and edge sliders so it sits just inside the eyes, then lift the exposure slightly and add a little texture, clarity and a touch of dehaze. At 100% the difference with the mask on and off is night and day.

After that the image goes over to Photoshop, because that's where the heavy lifting gets done.

The heavy lifting in Photoshop

My rule of thumb here is to look at the image and fix whatever jumps out first. On this one it was the shine down the middle of Michael's nose, which I took out with the Remove Tool on a new layer, then lowered the opacity to around 50% to bring some of the natural shine back. After that I used the Spot Healing Brush on a blank layer to clean up the more obvious marks in the concrete wall behind him, which was sharper than I'd like because of shooting at f/16.

Most of the work is dodging and burning on a 50% grey layer set to Soft Light, with the Dodge Tool at 10% exposure and the Option key (Alt on Windows) held down to switch to the Burn Tool with the same settings. I brighten the highlights and darken the shadows either side of them, around the eyes, down the nose, the eyebrows and the mouth, and then the folds in his top. It sneaks up on you; you often don't see it until you turn the layer off. Working on a grey layer rather than the image itself also means that if you go too far, you can paint over it with 50% grey and it's gone.

From there it's a handful of smaller things:

• a loose lasso round the teeth and a Hue/Saturation adjustment on the yellows, lifting the lightness slightly so they're cleaner without looking like he's had them done

• my 2010 technique, two passes of Unsharp Mask on merged layers, amount and radius at 20 then 10 with the threshold at 0, each painted in through a black mask, the first over the middle of the face and the second over the eyes, nose and mouth

• a skin texture effect using Reduce Noise at full strength with everything else at zero

• a High Pass layer at a radius of 2, set to Hard Light and placed on top, to bring back the sharpness in the eyes, hair and skin detail that the texture effect softens

The 2010 technique is superb on close-up portraits; it makes the face look as if it's coming forward off the screen, and even more so in print.

Camera Raw and a finishing touch

In the Camera Raw filter I used Lens Blur to soften the concrete wall and give the picture a bit of fake depth of field, brushing blur in around the top of the head, the ears and the shoulders so it feels more like f/2.8 or f/4 than f/16. I still wanted to be able to just about see the wall, so it isn't blacked out completely.

A linear gradient with the exposure brought down takes the edge off the bright top he's wearing, which was pulling my eye, and a radial gradient in the middle of the face at +0.2 exposure adds a little light where it matters. I do that last one on pretty much every portrait.

The finishing touch is a warm colour grade from Optics by Boris FX, using the Titanic look in the Portrait colour section, brought down to 50% opacity.

Making the print

I print pretty much every image I'm happy with onto A4, and this one went onto Fotospeed Natural Soft Textured Bright White 315, a fine art matte paper and one I use most of the time, on the Canon PRO-300.

The steps are:

• duplicate and flatten the image

• resize to 10 inches on the long edge at 300ppi

• soft proof with the paper profile, comparing relative and perceptual rendering intents

• a slight brightening just for the print

• save as a TIFF in Adobe RGB

• print from Canon Professional Print & Layout, with Heavyweight Fine Art Paper as the media type, the paper's ICC profile, perceptual rendering intent and black point compensation on

For this picture perceptual was the clear choice. Relative blocked the blacks up quite a lot, whereas perceptual gave it more contrast, which suited it.

Straight out of the printer it was looking really good, and on a matte paper like this it only gets better once the ink has had time to dry and settle. You can just about see detail in the back wall, which is what I was after, and the 2010 technique does exactly what I hoped, bringing the face forward off the page.

Why I always print

Our screens are fantastic, but it's not until you have something physical in your hands that you can really study it and start noticing the things you missed while editing. I truly believe printing can help you get better as a photographer, and certainly better at retouching.

If you'd like to follow along with the video step by step, the raw file I used is free to download from the classroom in my Photography Community on Skool: