I Was Wrong About Wanting the iPhone Duo

Well, that didn’t take long.

Less than 24 hours after thinking the iPhone Duo could be exactly what I needed, I’ve changed my mind.

On paper, I loved the idea. One device potentially doing the job of two: my phone and my iPad.

The biggest attraction was taking less kit on a shoot. If I could use the Duo for tethering, I could leave the iPad at home. Less to think about, less to charge and less to carry.

It appealed to me for travelling, too. A larger screen that folds up and fits in my pocket would be much more convenient than carrying my 13-inch iPad Pro.

I could already see how it might fit into what I do.

But then I read the comments in the Photography Community.

Some folks raised points that got me questioning my decision, so I did more digging. That included watching videos from Marques Brownlee and Proper Honest Tech. I subscribe to both channels, but I’d initially missed their videos.

They highlighted the benefits, but also got me thinking properly about what I’d be giving up.

For me, the biggest sticking points are the camera and Face ID.

Looking at Apple’s specifications, here are some of the differences between the Duo and the iPhone 18 Pro models:

• No dedicated telephoto camera. The Duo has main and ultra-wide cameras, with a 2x option using the main sensor. The 18 Pro models also have a dedicated 4x telephoto, with an 8x “optical-quality” option.

• No Apple ProRAW. The Duo lists HEIF and JPEG capture, while the Pro models also offer ProRAW.

• No variable aperture on the main camera. The 18 Pro models have this, while the Duo has a fixed aperture.

• Touch ID instead of Face ID. The Duo uses a fingerprint sensor in its side button.

• No Action button. Another difference from the Pro models.

The Duo’s main camera is still 48MP, but that doesn’t mean it’s the same camera as the Pro Max. For me, the bigger issue is losing the dedicated telephoto and Apple ProRAW. Those are options I want available, both for my own photography and when I’m teaching.

You can see the full details in Apple’s specifications for the iPhone Duo and iPhone 18 Pro models.

Those comparisons are with the new 18 Pro models, and I’m currently using a 17 Pro Max. So there are two decisions here: whether the Duo would suit me, and whether I need to upgrade my phone at all.

The camera is what really made me reconsider.

I now have the Fujifilm X100VI (thank you, Steve), and I intend to use that more for photography instead of automatically reaching for my iPhone, but that doesn’t mean I’ll stop taking photographs with my phone.

I’ve taken photographs with my iPhone that I’m really proud of.

There’ll also be times when I don’t have the Fuji with me, so my phone will be the camera I use, and when that happens, I want the best results I can get, with the flexibility that matters to me as a photographer.

Giving up camera features to gain a folding screen feels like a step backwards for how I work.

There’s the teaching side to consider, too.

I’m starting one-to-one and three-to-one workshops, with half-day and full-day options covering photography, lighting and retouching, as well as iPhone photography.

I want to be able to demonstrate the features and approaches I’m teaching. Moving to a phone without some of those options would limit what I could show, particularly when it comes to the Pro camera features.

Then there’s Face ID.

It works so well that I barely think about it. Unlocking my phone, opening banking apps... it’s something I use throughout the day without giving it a second thought.

I hadn’t realised how much I take it for granted until I considered going back to Touch ID.

For the number of times I open my phone each day, I think I’d find that tedious. It might sound like a small thing, but it’s a small thing I’d notice over and over again.

So, where does that leave me?

Do I need to upgrade from the 17 Pro Max to the 18 Pro Max?

Hmmm... honestly, I don’t know.

But I’m starting to wonder whether changing my iPad would solve more of the problem.

What if I traded in my 13-inch iPad Pro and went for an iPad mini instead?

Something smaller, lighter and easier to carry on shoots and when travelling.

It’s certainly an option I want to explore.

Yes, it’s still two devices; it’s still an iPhone and an iPad to charge and carry, but maybe that’s just how it’s got to be for me.

Do you have an iPad mini? Have you used it for tethering on shoots?

I’d love to hear how you get on with it. Is the screen big enough in practice? If you’ve moved from a larger iPad, do you miss it?

Let me know in the comments.

Your thoughts have already helped me reconsider one decision... they might help me get the next one right.

An Unexpected Gift ... the Fuji X100 VI

So the other day I met up with one of my closest friends, Steve Healy, for one of our regular catch ups / photo walks / breakfasts.

We try to do this near enough each week (commitments depending) and for both us it's a great opportunity to relax, unwind and just hangout. I love it.

The other day though, completely out of the blue, before we took a step, Steve gave me a wrapped present ... a Fuji X100 VI 😲

To say I was (and still am) blown away is understatement.

Even now, days later, I just don't know what to write that would come close to how I feel.

All I can say is that I love it, I'm overwhelmed, I'm ... I'm ... yeah lost for words.

It's no secret that I'm changing brands for my work camera but for everyday, always with me photography, this camera is such a dream, and now I have one, now and in the future it'll make me think of a dear friend ... and that's really special.

I'm very much someone that loves to give gifts than receive them, and Steve's the same, so he, more than anyone, knows how much this means to me!

Steve ... love you Buddy!

Oh ... of course, I then went on to buy some extras for it ... as you do 😃

Is Apple Photos REALLY Better Than Adobe Photoshop?

I honestly didn’t expect to be asking that question.

Photoshop has long been my first choice for removing unwanted people and objects from photographs. However, after testing the updated Clean Up tool in Apple Photos, I got results that weren’t simply comparable to Photoshop—they were noticeably better.

To find out whether this was a one-off, I put Apple Photos and Photoshop through three increasingly difficult tests.

Apple Photos Clean Up vs Photoshop Remove Tool

For the Photoshop edits, I used the Remove Tool with its mode set to Auto. This allows Photoshop to decide whether to use generative AI, Content-Aware technology or another method to fill the selected area.

For Apple Photos, I used the Clean Up tool on my iPhone, selecting the High Quality option. The same technology is also available in the desktop version of Apple Photos.

In both applications, I made quick, rough selections around the people I wanted to remove. I wasn’t attempting to produce perfect selections or spend time manually tidying the results. The aim was to see what each application could produce on its own.

Test One: Removing People From a Railway Station

The first photograph was taken at Cardiff Central railway station during a World War II-themed portrait shoot.

Original

I wanted to remove a group of people on the left-hand side of the frame. This meant the software needed to rebuild part of the station interior behind them.

Photoshop took almost a minute to process the removal. From a distance, the result looked acceptable. It had reconstructed much of the background and hadn’t caused too much damage to the surrounding areas. However, closer inspection revealed several areas that would need tidying.

Apple Photos completed the same task in around five seconds.

Clean Up using Apple Photos

The result was much cleaner. It reconstructed the background convincingly, removed distracting marks and shadows from the floor and created a space that genuinely looked as though you could walk through it.

It was an impressive start for Apple Photos—but the next test was considerably harder.

Test Two: Rebuilding a Complex Event Backdrop

The second photograph showed me standing with Carly from BenQ at the Wex Summer Roadshow.

Original

Removing both of us meant rebuilding a large section of the image, including a branded backdrop, a table, several logos and objects in the background.

Photoshop initially produced a result that looked quite impressive. It managed to recreate several BenQ logos and parts of the display. However, the longer I looked at the image, the more problems appeared.

Some of the logos were distorted, the table didn’t make complete sense and Photoshop had created several strange objects in the background. It had filled the empty space, but the result would require a fair amount of additional work.

Apple Photos took approximately 15 seconds to complete the same removal.

The difference was remarkable.

Clean Up using Apple Photos

The backdrop was clean, the logos were correctly positioned and the table had been rebuilt without an obvious join. It also reconstructed the wall and background pictures convincingly without duplicating random objects.

In this example, Apple Photos was the clear winner.

Test Three: An Almost Impossible Removal

The final photograph was the toughest test.

It showed me with Harry, a potter I photographed for my I Am Lyme project. Between us, we covered a large part of the frame, leaving the software with very little visible background to use as a reference.

Original

Photoshop filled the space, but the result looked confused. It repeated objects, created strange shapes and produced an area that became less convincing the longer you examined it.

Apple Photos produced something completely different.

Clean Up using Apple Photos

It reconstructed the trolley behind us, including one of its legs and a wheel. It also created a believable continuation of the workshop wall, complete with pots, tools and other details that matched the surrounding environment.

Was every generated detail an accurate reconstruction of what was really there? Of course not. Neither application can see through people to reveal the original background.

What mattered was whether the generated result looked believable—and the Apple Photos version did.

Looking at the Results Side by Side

After completing all three tests, I transferred the Apple Photos versions to my computer and compared them directly with the Photoshop edits.

The first Photoshop result was acceptable, but the Apple version was cleaner.

The second comparison wasn’t particularly close. Apple Photos handled the branded backdrop, table and background objects far more convincingly.

The third result was the most surprising of all. Photoshop appeared to fill the space with repeated textures and objects, whereas Apple Photos created a much more coherent scene.

Across these three photographs, Apple Photos consistently produced the better result.

Does This Mean Apple Photos Is Better Than Photoshop?

Not as an overall photo editor.

Photoshop remains an incredibly powerful application with an enormous range of professional editing, retouching, compositing and creative tools. Apple Photos isn’t going to replace it in my workflow.

However, when it comes to these specific removal tasks, Apple Photos’ Clean Up tool was better than Photoshop’s Remove Tool—and in some cases, it was considerably better.

It was also incredibly easy to use. I simply traced around the subjects with my finger, tapped Clean Up and waited a few seconds.

Questions About Resolution and Cost

There are still a couple of areas I want to investigate further.

The first is resolution. An image can look convincing on a phone or computer screen, but printing it is a much more demanding test. I’d like to see how much genuine detail the Clean Up tool generates and how well those reconstructed areas hold up in a physical print.

The other consideration is cost. Apple has indicated that some server-based AI features may have usage limits, with expanded access potentially becoming available for a fee. How that develops—and what it might eventually cost—remains to be seen.

Final Thoughts

Three photographs can’t tell us how these tools will perform in every possible situation. Different images, backgrounds and lighting conditions will inevitably produce different results.

But in these tests, particularly the two most challenging removals, Apple Photos was clearly ahead.

The results were clean, convincing and produced in seconds with nothing more than a rough selection made using my finger.

I never expected to say this, but Adobe genuinely needs to step things up.

Watch the video to see the full editing process and all three comparisons, then let me know what you think. Were you as impressed by the Apple Photos results as I was?

How to Fix Photoshop Scratch Disk Full (once and for all)

This warning has popped up a few times recently when I’ve been using Photoshop, and if you’ve seen it too, you might be wondering what a scratch disk actually is… and what you’re supposed to clear.

So, to accompany the video, I thought I’d put the steps here so you’ve got something to refer back to. There’s also a way to change your scratch disk if Photoshop won’t even open.

First, check which drive Photoshop is using

Before doing anything else, save your work if Photoshop will let you.

Then head to:

• Mac: Photoshop > Settings > Scratch Disks

• Windows: Edit > Preferences > Scratch Disks

Look at which drive is selected and how much space is available. That’s the drive we need to check.

You might have another drive connected with loads of room, but unless Photoshop is configured to use it, that space isn’t helping.

What exactly is a scratch disk?

Think of it as extra working room.

Imagine working on a print at a table. The print itself might be quite small, but you still need space around it for everything you’re using.

Photoshop needs that working room too. It uses space on a drive to store temporary information whilst you edit, so the size of your saved photograph doesn’t tell you how much space Photoshop might need to work on it.

There’s also a difference between a warning that space is getting low and an error that stops you opening Photoshop, editing or saving. A warning doesn’t necessarily mean the drive is completely full, but dismissing it doesn’t give Photoshop any more room.

Free up some space

Adobe recommends having at least 100 GB free on your primary scratch drive when troubleshooting this error. That’s guidance rather than a guarantee that every job will fit. Larger projects may need more.

Start with files you recognise: old video exports, downloads or projects you’ve already finished.

If you move them to another drive, check that the copies are there and open properly before removing the originals. And remember, putting files in the Trash or Recycle Bin doesn’t immediately free up the space. Review what’s in there before emptying it.

Once you’ve made room, save your work if you can, quit Photoshop completely and reopen it. Then try whatever you were doing when the warning appeared.

Give Photoshop another drive to use

If storage on your computer is always tight, another option is to give Photoshop a suitable drive with plenty of available space.

I use an SSD as a dedicated scratch disk.

Go back into Scratch Disks, select the drive and, if you’ve selected more than one, use the arrows to set their order. Adobe recommends putting the fastest drive first.

Click OK, then restart Photoshop.

Oh, and changing this setting doesn’t move your photographs. You’re choosing where Photoshop can put its temporary working data. If you’re using an external SSD, keep it connected whilst Photoshop is using it.

What if Photoshop won’t open?

You can’t get into Settings if Photoshop refuses to launch, but there’s a shortcut for that.

Hold these keys whilst launching Photoshop:

• Mac: Command + Option

• Windows: Ctrl + Alt

This lets you choose a scratch disk during startup. Select a suitable drive with space available, then continue opening Photoshop.

Don’t add the Shift key. That’s the shortcut for resetting preferences, which we’ll come to shortly.

Of course, if your only drive is full, the shortcut won’t create any extra space. You’ll need to make room outside Photoshop first.

Still getting the warning?

First, double-check that the free space you’re looking at belongs to the drive selected in Photoshop.

Then try quitting Photoshop completely and reopening it. Its temporary working data can build up during a session, and closing your photographs doesn’t necessarily release everything.

A restart can help, but it won’t solve a drive that’s consistently running out of room.

It’s also worth checking History States, under Settings / Preferences > Performance > History & Cache.

This controls how many previous editing steps Photoshop keeps available for you to return to. Keeping more can require more scratch space.

Adobe’s documented default is 50. If you’ve increased yours to several hundred, consider whether you really need that many. Reducing the number may help, but you’ll have fewer steps you can go back to.

Be careful with Purge

You might have seen advice to choose Edit > Purge > All.

This can release memory and scratch space, but understand what it does before clicking it: purging clears temporary editing information, including your history.

It doesn’t return your photograph to its original appearance, but you lose the ability to go back through the history you’ve cleared. You can’t undo the purge.

Save your work first if possible, and treat this as an optional troubleshooting step.

Resetting preferences

If you’ve checked the correct drive, made room and restarted, but the error keeps returning, resetting Photoshop’s preferences is another troubleshooting option.

This can help if damaged preference files are contributing to the problem. It doesn’t create storage, and it can remove your custom settings, so back those up first.

With Photoshop open, go to Settings / Preferences > General > Reset Preferences on Quit. Confirm, quit and reopen Photoshop, then check your scratch disk selection again.

If Photoshop won’t open, hold these keys whilst launching:

• Mac: Command + Option + Shift

• Windows: Ctrl + Alt + Shift

That’s the shortcut with the extra Shift key. You’ll be asked whether you want to delete the Photoshop settings file.

Start with the Scratch Disks panel

The main thing is to check which drive Photoshop is actually using and how much room it has. Then free up space or give it another suitable drive to work with.

Make one change at a time and repeat whatever caused the warning. That way, you’ll know what helped.

The video above takes you through where to find everything.

Right, I hope that’s useful.

Glyn

Has Apple Made Us Question Every “Real” Photo?

When Apple announced the new iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, they also introduced something that, as a photographer, I'm definitely interested in. It's called Apple Reference Image, and the idea is to give us stronger evidence about where a photograph came from, as in whether it's real or not.

I can see some real benefits to that, particularly when somebody looks at a photograph and immediately dismisses it as AI, but there's one detail that raises a few questions; it's optional. You have to choose to use it.

So what happens when somebody doesn't? Have they got something to hide, did they forget to switch it on, or were they simply using a camera that doesn't offer it? That's the part I think we need to talk about alongside the technology itself, because how we interpret this could be just as important as what it does.

What Apple has actually announced

Apple says the iPhone 18 Pro's main camera captures signed sensor data in reference mode, and its Private Cloud Compute system then develops that into an unaltered reference image. You can view that reference alongside the main photograph in Photos and compare the two, and Apple has also announced support for developers to enable reference viewing in other apps.

There are launch restrictions too. Reference capture won't initially be available in the EU, and it won't be available at all in China.

The useful idea here is having something to go back to when you want to examine a finished picture, but a comparison isn't necessarily a complete record of every editing step. I wouldn't assume we'll get a list telling us which tool was used, in which application and in what order.

Where it could help

Imagine you've made a photograph of something unusual. Perhaps the light was extraordinary, or you happened to catch a moment that looks almost too good to be true. You share it and somebody says straight away that it's AI, and at that point "no it isn't, I was there" might not get you very far.

A trustworthy reference could give you something more useful to put in front of them, but it won't make everybody believe you. Some people have already made their minds up, whatever evidence you show them; for somebody who actually wants to examine the picture, though, additional evidence could help.

I can also see a potential benefit for picture editors and clients. If the question is whether something significant has been added or removed, being able to compare the finished picture with a trusted reference could make that conversation a lot clearer.

Editing isn't the same as dishonesty

This is the part that interests me most, because I spend a lot of my time teaching Photoshop and Lightroom. Editing a photograph doesn't, by itself, tell you whether somebody is being dishonest.

Take a portrait. I might adjust the white balance, lift the shadows, remove a temporary blemish, or go quite a bit further than that. Those are changes, of course they are, but what matters is what the photograph is for and what the changes actually do and what I'm telling you about it.

If I remove a person from a news photograph, that could change your understanding of what happened entirely. If I make a composite and tell you it's a composite, you're being given the information you need to understand the work. That distinction matters.

So I'd like to see tools like this encourage more useful conversations about editing. What changed, did it alter the meaning, and was the picture presented honestly? Those questions tell us far more than simply asking whether Photoshop was involved.

The trouble with voluntary

My first concern is that the people who want to show how their pictures were made have a reason to take part, whilst somebody who wants to conceal what they've done can simply choose not to. That doesn't make the feature pointless, but it does limit what we can conclude from it. We could end up with some pictures that have supporting evidence and many more where we still don't know, and the danger is how quickly "we don't know" turns into "it must be fake".

Imagine somebody captures a really important moment but hasn't enabled the feature. Perhaps they didn't know it existed, or didn't expect to photograph anything important that day; they saw something happening, picked up their phone and took a picture, which is hardly unusual behaviour. Should we trust their photograph less because they didn't think about authentication beforehand? I'd be very uncomfortable with that.

Then there are people using older phones, different cameras or equipment that simply doesn't support this system. Their photographs don't become less honest because somebody else bought a newer phone, and I wouldn't want us drifting towards a situation where you're expected to own certain kit just to have your work taken seriously.

The obvious response is to have it switched on for everybody, and that's a fair point, but I also understand wanting a choice. People use their cameras for all sorts of things, family pictures and visual notes and creative experiments and work in progress, and they may not want an extra reference workflow attached to everything they shoot.

Before deciding whether it ought to be on by default, I'd want to understand the practical experience. What happens when you've got no connection, how much extra storage is involved, and how long does the process take? Those are questions worth testing, and I'm not suggesting they're established problems. If something is easy to use and clearly useful, people have a reason to adopt it; if it adds confusion or friction, a lot of people won't bother.

What happens after you press the shutter

There's also the journey a photograph takes after it's been made. You might edit it, export it, send it in a message, upload it somewhere, or have somebody else download it and pass it on. What happens to the supporting evidence along the way? Can the person at the end find it, can they view it with the software they already have, and will they understand what they're looking at?

A feature can work perfectly for the photographer and still be of limited value to the viewer if the evidence is hard to get at. That's something I'd want to test properly, taking a photograph through a normal editing and sharing workflow and then seeing what the recipient can actually check.

I'd also want to see how clearly the interface separates missing evidence, a failed check and a successful check, because those are completely different situations. If they all get read as a simple real or fake verdict, we're going to create a lot of confusion.

A true photograph can still mislead

There's one final limitation that no amount of enthusiasm about authentication should make us forget; a camera can faithfully photograph a misleading situation. I can stage a scene, choose a viewpoint that leaves out something important, or put an inaccurate caption underneath.

Imagine I photograph a small group of people waiting outside a building. One caption says they're waiting for it to open, another says they're protesting against its closure. Same picture, completely different stories, and checking where the image came from doesn't by itself tell you which caption is accurate.

That's a recognised limitation of photo provenance more broadly; evidence about an image's history can't, on its own, establish whether the content is factual. We still need context, which means asking who published the picture, what they're claiming, and what other evidence supports it.

Where that leaves me

I'm definitely interested, and I can't wait to see how it works in practice. Giving photographers a stronger way to support their pictures could be really valuable, and so could making it easier to examine meaningful changes, but I think we need to be careful about what we conclude.

If a reference image is available, use it as evidence and understand what it does and doesn't establish. If it isn't, ask questions rather than jumping straight to an accusation.

For me, that's the biggest concern with the voluntary approach. The people who opt in may gain a useful way to support their work, whilst everybody else could find themselves under suspicion for no good reason.

Why your Prints are Too Dark (and How to Fix It)

Of everything I get asked about with printing, why do my prints come out dark is the one that comes up more than anything else, and if it's happening to you then you haven't done anything daft. You've more than likely just taken the same advice that I did before I figured this out.

Why it happens

Your screen is backlit. It's basically a light source, the same as a lamp is, and a print isn't. All a print can do is bounce back whatever light is already in the room, so you've got one thing making light and one thing borrowing it, and those two are never going to look exactly the same.

However, here's the bit that catches everybody out. If your screen is throwing out more light than a sheet of paper could ever hand back to you, something happens while you're editing that you won't notice at the time. The picture looks bright because everything on the screen looks bright, so you bring it down a little, and what you've actually done is make that adjustment based on the screen rather than the picture. Then you send it to the printer and the paper has got no way of lifting it back up again, so you get the version you darkened on a surface that can't do anything about it.

The number

What you'll normally hear is to set the brightness in your calibration software to somewhere between 80 and 120 candela, and more often than not you'll hear 120. Sure, 120 looks great. It's bright and everything on it has a bit of life to it, but that is exactly what's wrong with it. It looks great because it's throwing out far more light than a sheet of paper is ever going to give back to you, and all the time it's sat there looking great you're quietly pulling down pictures that were never too bright to begin with.

I'm not saying everybody else has got it wrong. I'm saying I took that recommendation and my prints were always too dark.

The histogram is the only thing telling the truth

When your screen is calibrated too bright it's kind of lying to you, and the histogram is the only thing you can really trust. Change your screen brightness and to your eye the picture completely changes, but the histogram doesn't move, not one bit, because nothing has changed in the actual file. It's the one thing in this whole process that doesn't care how bright your monitor is.

The settings I use

After a lot of trial and error, and I do mean a lot, along with a fair bit of wasted paper, ink and money, I settled at 60 candela for my screen in my workspace, and I've not had a print come out too dark since. The software you calibrate with may well look different to mine, but the numbers transfer straight across:

• luminance 60 cd/m2

• white point D65

• gamut Adobe RGB

• gamma 2.2

• black point 0.5 cd/m2

Most calibration software will offer you presets, and the photography one will typically drop the luminance in at 120, which is the whole problem, so I ignore the presets and put the numbers into the custom target instead. The black point is worth a word too. By default it'll be sat at absolute zero, and I lift mine just a touch to 0.5, because even in the darkest parts of a picture I still want a bit of detail; at absolute zero it's just completely black.

I'm not saying 60 is the right number for everybody either, because the room you're working in comes into it.

The room your screen is sat in

Your eyes don't judge a screen on its own, they judge it against everything else around it, so a bright screen in a dark room appears brighter than it actually is, you darken more, and it's the same problem again only now the room is making it worse.

Two things matter. Enough light in the room, and light that's fairly neutral rather than a warm domestic bulb, because a warm bulb will have you making decisions about colour and that's a whole different problem. In my office the main light stays off and I use a Screen Bar Halo 2 from BenQ instead, which throws light down onto the desk without any of it hitting the screen and puts a glow on the wall behind the monitor. That glow on the wall is the bit that does the work, because it cuts out the extreme contrast of sitting in a dark room with just a screen on.

If you haven't got a calibrator

You can still get most of the way there for nothing. Take a print you've already made, hold it up next to your screen, and bring the screen's brightness down until the two of them look pretty much the same. That's it. It won't fix your colour and it isn't calibration, but it's a down and dirty way to stop your prints coming out too dark.

Whichever way you go at it, going from 100 down to 60 or thereabouts will look far too dark at first, and it is quite a jump, but just let your eyes adjust and they will after a few minutes, and very quickly it'll seem normal.

Your Next Camera just got MORE EXPENSIVE

If you've been saving up for a new camera here in the UK, it's worth going back and checking the price you've got in your head, because it might not be the price any more. Three Fujifilm bodies cost noticeably more today than they did a couple of weeks ago, and nobody said a word about it.

What actually went up

I'd heard a rumour that price rises were coming in on the 1st September, so on the 31st August I wrote down the prices of 13 camera bodies across Wex and the manufacturers' own stores, then went back a few days later to see what had changed.

Comparing one shop against another never tells you anything useful, because there's always a promotion running somewhere, or a different margin sitting behind the counter. The only thing that means anything is the same camera at the same shop on two different days.

At Wex the changes were clear:

• Fujifilm X100VI, £1,599 to £1,749

• Fujifilm X-T50, £1,299 to £1,399

• Fujifilm GFX 100 II, £6,999 to £7,499

That's £150 on the X100VI, which is a shade over 9%, £100 on the X-T50, and £500 on the GFX.

This isn't a case of a retailer quietly moving their margins about either, because Fujifilm's own UK web store shows exactly the same prices, and when a manufacturer changes the price on their own shop, that's the new baseline.

Two bodies that turned up on a leaked European retail list earlier in the summer, the X-S20 and the X-E4/X-E5 line, have stayed where they were for now.

Why it's happening

The interesting bit is that Fujifilm did explain all of this, just not to us. They explained it to their investors.

In their August quarterly financial presentation they set out a big jump in production costs tied directly to memory chips, which is the DRAM and flash memory that sits inside a digital camera. Demand from AI data centres has pushed the price of those components up, and cameras are competing for the same parts.

Fujifilm had originally forecast that memory costs would hit their imaging division by around 6 billion yen this year, but in that August report they more than doubled that to 14 billion yen, naming digital cameras and instant photo systems specifically. Their stated plan for handling it is "pricing measures and the procurement of alternative materials", which in plain English means passing some of the bill along to us.

Loud in Japan, silent over here

What makes it frustrating is that none of this is being said out loud in this country, because in Japan the manufacturers have been completely open about it all year.

Canon published formal notices about price adjustments across dozens of products back in May, Nikon issued official notices covering bodies like the Z50 II, and Sony posted updates for their cinema line in August. Over here we just woke up to bigger numbers on the product pages.

If you shoot Canon, Sony or Nikon and you reckon you're in the clear because UK prices haven't moved yet, I wouldn't get too comfortable. Shops tend to sell the stock they've already got at the price they paid for it, so once the warehouse clears and the next batch lands at the new wholesale cost, the shelf price usually follows.

OM System are doing the complete opposite at the minute, running their own discounts on their site through to late September on bodies like the OM-1 Mark II and the OM-5.

What I'd check before buying

However, there's a simple way to work out where you actually stand, and it takes a couple of minutes.

Start on the manufacturer's own store, because that gives you the true current RRP and it'll tell you straight away whether a quiet rise has already gone through. Then go and look at the independents you normally buy from, because if they're still sitting on earlier stock they may well still be selling at the old price, and that difference stays in your pocket. Depending on the body, that could be anywhere from £100 to £500.

None of this is a reason to rush out and buy something you weren't going to buy anyway, but if a camera has been on your list for a while, it's worth knowing that the number you wrote down a month ago might not be the number you pay. If you've spotted a quiet rise, or a sudden discount, on something you've been saving for, do say so in the comments; it all helps everyone work out where things are really heading.

Your Mac is Changing your Prints

You set the file up, soft proof it in Photoshop, load your favourite paper, hit print, and what comes out looks nothing like what you were looking at on screen. The colours are off, the skin tones have picked up a heavy magenta cast, and you're stood there wondering what on earth just happened.

Same printer, same paper, same profile, two completely different results.

Nine times out of ten it isn't your editing and it isn't your paper profile. It's your Mac, quietly making a decision on your behalf without ever telling you about it.

When you plug a printer into macOS, the system will very often set it up using AirPrint rather than the manufacturer's full driver. It does it silently, there's no warning, and it takes away your control over the settings that actually matter for a fine art print.

Why AirPrint gets in the way

AirPrint is fine for knocking out a boarding pass or an email, but for printing work you care about it causes real problems.

The big one is colour management. The option to turn off the printer's own colour handling disappears, so Photoshop and macOS both end up trying to manage the colour at the same time, and they don't agree.

Then there's the media types. Instead of picking the fine art paper you've actually loaded, you're left with basic options like plain paper or photo paper, which means the printer can't set the right head height or the correct ink limits for what's going through it.

Put those two together and you get the colour shifts, and it's the skin tones where you'll notice it first.

Checking and fixing it

However, there's a good reason it happens, and there's a simple way round it. This takes about a minute, and it'll save you a fair bit of ink and paper.

Start by going to your printer manufacturer's website, Canon, Epson or whoever it might be, and download the full driver software for your model, then install it.

Next, on your Mac, head to System Settings, then Printers and Scanners, click the info icon next to your printer and have a look at the driver details. If it mentions AirPrint anywhere, remove the printer.

Then add it back properly. Click Add Printer, select your device from the list, and this is the bit people miss, look at the Use dropdown at the bottom. Don't leave it on the default AirPrint option. Choose Select Software, pick your manufacturer's driver from the list, and click Add.

That's it.

Once the full driver is in place, all your print settings come back, the custom media types are there, and the colour management options are exactly where they should be, which is the bit that makes the whole difference.

There's a full walkthrough in the video above with the side by side print comparison, so you can see the setup on screen as you go.

Focus Stacking, AI and What Counts as a Photograph

World Press Photo has tightened up the rules for its 2026 contest, and the list of what's now out is longer than you might expect. No synthetic images. No generative fill. No AI enlarging either, so Adobe Super Resolution and Topaz Photo AI are both named and both ruled out. Then there's the bit that surprised me more: phone pictures are only eligible if they were shot in standard mode, so HDR, portrait mode, creative lighting effects and panorama mode all disqualify an entry, and multiple exposures and stitched panoramas are gone as well, however they were made.

It's worth sitting with that for a minute, because a fair bit of ordinary, honest photography falls outside those lines.

The rule is about trust, not technique

To be fair to World Press Photo, none of this is really about punishing anybody for blending frames. It's a photojournalism contest, and it's trying to hold a line on one question: does this image record something that actually happened, in front of a lens, at a moment in time. Nothing added, rearranged, reversed, distorted or removed from within the frame. Colour work and cropping are fine, sensor dust can go, but anything that changes what's in the picture is out, and any influence over the scene has to be declared, so a posed portrait or a reenactment gets said out loud in the caption, as do any directions given to the person in front of the camera.

That's a sensible place to draw it for news photography, where the whole point of the image is that it's evidence. I understand exactly why they've put it there.

Worth saying as well, because it gets missed, the rules aren't anti-AI across the board. Denoise is fine. So are automatic adjustments on levels, colour and contrast, along with object selection for local adjustments, all on the condition that they don't add or remove anything the camera captured. You can use AI to pick out a sky and work on it, but you can't hand in a shot your phone quietly built out of several exposures, which tells you the line isn't really about how clever the software is, it's about whether anything got added along the way.

But hardly any of us are shooting under those rules

Here's the bit that's been nagging at me. Outside of photojournalism, computed images aren't the exception; they're the default. Plenty of landscape and seascape photographers stack focus or blend exposures as a matter of course, and most stopped thinking of it as anything unusual years ago. Every phone in every pocket is doing HDR without ever being asked. Portrait mode is now how most people on earth see a photograph of a face, and none of that is invented out of nothing, it's still light hitting a sensor, but it is an image assembled from more information than one exposure could ever hold.

So when a contest draws its line at the single frame, it's protecting something real for its own corner of the industry, but it also shows up how far the rest of us have drifted without ever really noticing we'd crossed anything.

Then there's what AI is doing to all of it

The reason World Press Photo has had to spell this out in so much detail is the same reason it matters to the rest of us. Generated images are now indistinguishable from photographs at a glance, and they're being made at a scale that's hard to picture. The Gemini app passed a billion people a month on the 11th August, and Google reckon it's turning out over 150 million images a day. That's one app.

Google also had to pull the AI image feature out of Google Earth a day after it launched, because people were immediately generating photorealistic satellite imagery that broke its own policies. One day.

Against that, a photography contest banning AI outright isn't an overreaction; it's one of the very few places drawing any line at all, at a point where a convincing photograph of a real place, taken by nobody, is a perfectly normal thing to come across.

Where I land on it

I don't think World Press Photo is wrong to ban AI images from a photojournalism contest, because that's precisely what the contest is for. However, I don't think the stricter stuff about HDR and portrait mode and stitched panoramas is really about AI at all. It's a reminder that "unmanipulated photograph" stopped being a simple category a long time before generative AI turned up, and most of us made our peace with that a good while ago without giving it much thought.

So the more honest question probably isn't whether a picture is AI or not; it's what any of us are actually claiming happened in front of the camera when we hand somebody an image and call it a photograph.

I haven't got a tidy answer to that, and I'm not sure the industry has either.

🚨 Here’s a link to the World Press Photo Competition Rules: www.worldpressphoto.org/contest/entry-rules

Who is Photoshop for now? 🤷‍♂️ (update 27.10.0)

Here's a question I've been carrying around for a while now, and I still haven't got a tidy answer for it …

Who is Photoshop for now?

For most of the years I've been using it, Photoshop has been the place I go to disappear. I'll open an image with a rough idea of where I want to take it, start working, and the next time I look up properly two hours have gone. That isn't just productivity, it's creative escapism, and I think that deep flow state is why so many of us fell in love with the application in the first place.

Lately though, opening Photoshop feels a bit different. It feels like it wants something from me. It wants me to write a text prompt, it wants me to keep an eye on my generative credit balance, and it seems remarkably keen to show me what it can do without me.

I want to be clear about where I'm coming from. I love Photoshop; it's what I do, it's what I built my career on, and I'm not going anywhere. But when you genuinely care about a tool you pay close attention to the direction it's pointing in, and looking at what's arrived in recent releases like version 27.10.0, I think it's worth having an honest conversation about where things are heading.

Two interfaces and a bit of an identity crisis

There are a few significant shifts in the interface in the newer updates.

The contextual taskbar now has a dedicated Prompt to Edit button, so instead of making a careful selection first, you can prompt changes right across an entire image using various AI models.

Then there's the AI Assisted Editor workspace, which you can enable from the menus. Switch to it and Photoshop strips away your layers, your familiar tools and your adjustments, and replaces the lot with a prompt driven layout that looks and behaves like Adobe Firefly sitting inside Photoshop.

There's also the Pro Editor label. The workspace you and I have used for decades, with its layer stacks, blend modes, masks and smart objects, is now officially labelled the Pro Editor to tell it apart from the AI Assisted mode. Photoshop never used to need a qualifier; it was just Photoshop.

I do understand the logic from Adobe's side. The full Photoshop interface is intimidating for beginners and a simplified prompt box lowers the barrier to entry, but turning the whole canvas into a prompt box disables the very foundation that makes Photoshop worth learning in the first place, which is non destructive layers, precise pixel control, and being able to unpick your creative decisions months down the line.

If someone purely wants to generate an image from text, they've already got dedicated web tools and mobile apps for that. What they don't need is desktop Photoshop with its core strengths stripped out.

Resolution and control

Beyond the workflow philosophy there are some practical hiccups when you lean on whole image generative edits.

Run a full prompt, asking the software to add weather effects say, and it generates an entirely new flattened layer. Even with the recent improvements to generation resolution, the output is often softer and lower in detail than your original camera file.

If you then try to mask through to recover the original sharpness on your subject's face, you run into problems fairly quickly. Perspective shifts, subtle facial alterations and mismatched lighting mean the generated background no longer lines up cleanly with the original capture, so you end up spending extra time fixing blend modes, manually aligning shifted anatomy and correcting colour mismatches, just to make the composite work.

The credit counter

There's another subtle shift that changes how the software feels to use, and that's the generative credit counter.

Adobe have made the right decision by being transparent and showing you exactly what a generation will cost before you press the button; hiding the cost would be far worse. But seeing that meter tick down does introduce a psychological hesitation.

You pause before generating. You wonder whether this variation is worth spending a credit on or whether you ought to save it, and if the result comes back slightly off, you've then got to decide whether a second roll of the dice is worth the cost.

In twenty years of editing I've never opened a Curves adjustment and wondered whether I could afford it. I've never dodged and burned a portrait with a bill running in the corner of the screen. Creativity thrives when you're free to experiment, fail and try again without an active meter running.

The quiet lane and the loud lane

I don't want any of this to sound like a complaint about modern features. In recent updates to Camera Raw, Adobe introduced a new Glow adjustment covering diffusion, bloom and halation. It doesn't need a prompt. It's practical, it's well engineered, and it's built directly for photographers and retouchers, which is Adobe at their absolute best.

Historically Photoshop has moved forward in two lanes at the same time. There's the loud lane, the flashy headline grabbing features that generate all the excitement, and there's the quiet lane, the foundational unglamorous refinements to core tools, performance, selections and menus that quietly save you ten minutes on every job for the next five years.

My concern isn't that generative AI exists in Photoshop. My concern is that the quiet lane slows down because all the engineering focus goes into the loud one. We need generative tools when they genuinely speed up complex retouching work, but we also need the core engine to keep advancing, and we shouldn't have to choose between modern AI assistance and the deep precise craft of manual image making.

I'd be interested to know where you've landed on it, whether the generative tools have changed the way you work, or whether you're staying firmly in the layer stack.