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.

Reflection Removal NOT WORKING in Lightroom? Try this

The Reflection Removal tool in Lightroom and Camera Raw is a brilliant addition, but it does have its limits at the moment, and that comes down to the way it's been designed. As things stand it's built for windows that are the dominant part of the picture, so if the glass you're working on is only a small part of the frame, you can hit apply, watch the bar do its thing, and end up with an image that looks exactly the same as it did before.

Someone in my photography community got in touch about this. He had a raw file of a cabinet indoors, he'd followed all the usual steps, and the reflections just wouldn’t shift.

However, there's a good reason for that, and there's a simple way round it.

Why it ignores some reflections

Reflection Removal sits under Distraction Removal, and right now it's looking for a big window; a properly dominant one, filling a good chunk of the frame.

Put it on a glass display case, or a pair of glasses, or a window that only takes up a modest part of the scene, and the algorithm often does nothing at all. It isn't broken; it just doesn't think there's anything there worth working on.

I'd expect that to change. These tools tend to get better quickly, and smaller areas will almost certainly be handled in time. For now though, we take a slightly different route.

The Photoshop route

Worth saying first, doing it in Camera Raw or Lightroom doesn't use any generative credits, which is one of the nicer things about it, but taking the file into Photoshop and using AI will use a credit, but you do get total control over what happens, and the result is clean.

It works like this.

1. open the image in Photoshop, which from Lightroom is a right click and Edit In > Adobe Photoshop

2. grab the Polygonal Lasso Tool, or whichever selection tool you get on with, and draw around the glass with the reflections in it

3. click Generative Fill on the Contextual Taskbar

4. in the model picker, choose Firefly Image 5

5. type in the prompt: remove the reflection from off the glass do not change the original content

6. hit Generate

That's it.

Firefly Image 5 is the part that matters here; it's designed to edit while holding on to the detail that's already in the file, so Photoshop isn't off inventing new objects and quietly swapping your subject for something it made up.

What comes back

Because it's a detail-preserving model, you get one result rather than the usual three variations to choose between.

The reflections go, and the things that were sitting behind the glass all along, book spines, shelves, whatever happens to be in there, come through properly. It looks very much like you'd screwed a polariser onto the front of the lens and dealt with it at the time of shooting, which is the bit I really like about it.

Removing People in Lightroom When You Don't Use Photoshop

Taking a person out of the middle of a group shot isn't something I'd do this way. If it were my picture I'd be in Photoshop, on layers, doing it properly by hand, because that's what I know and that's what gives me control over every last bit of it.

But that's me, and I've spent years getting comfortable in there. Plenty of people haven't, and don't want to, and have no particular reason to. So this post isn't really for photographers who already live in Photoshop. It's for everybody else.

Who this is actually for

If you edit in Lightroom and that's where you're happy, this is for you. If you don't have Photoshop installed and can't see the point in paying for something you'd open twice a year, this is for you as well. If you've had a go at layers and masks and found the whole thing off-putting, same again.

It doesn't have to be for professional work either. Most of the time it won't be. It's the family photo where somebody's stood in the middle who you'd rather wasn't, the holiday shot that would be lovely if it were just the four of you, the picture you want to get printed and stick on the wall. That's a perfectly good reason to want this, and there's no sense in learning a whole other application for it.

Why the Remove tool struggles here

Lightroom has Generative Remove built in and for everyday bits it's brilliant. A bin in the background, a stray sign, someone wandering through the far side of the frame, it deals with all of that without any fuss.

Ask it to take a whole person out of the middle of a group, though, and it tends to come unstuck. You get warped detail where the arms and hands were, limbs that seem to belong to nobody, and a strange empty space where the person was stood. Everybody else stays exactly where they were, which is really the giveaway. The gap is the problem, not the person.

Sending it over to Firefly

What you can do instead, without leaving your catalogue, is push the photo across to Adobe Firefly and let it rebuild that part of the frame.

It works like this.

• go to the Photo menu in Lightroom

• choose Generate in Firefly, then Edit photo

• pick your model in the panel at the bottom

• set the output quality to High

• write your prompt

• hit Generate

I tried a few models and GPT Image 2 gave me the most natural result of the lot. Worth trying a couple yourself, because they behave differently on the same picture.

The prompt is doing most of the work

This is the part that decides whether it works, so it's worth slowing down over.

A vague prompt gets you a vague result. Tell it to remove the person and that's all it'll do, which puts you straight back where you started with a hole in the middle of the photo. What you want is to describe the finished picture, not the job.

So ask for three things. Remove the person. Close the space between the people either side of them. Keep the original faces, clothing and background as they are. That last one is the bit most people leave out, and it's why results come back with faces that look subtly wrong and nobody quite able to say what's changed.

Say all three plainly, in a sentence or two, then generate.

Getting the resolution back

Firefly gives you a clean result, but a smaller one than you sent it. The original here was over 6000 pixels wide straight out of the camera, so there's one more step before you're done.

On the left hand toolbar there's an Upscale option. Take it up by 4x and you're back over 6000 pixels wide, which matches the original file. Hit Download, bring it back into your catalogue, and carry on editing it like any other frame.

That's it. No layers, no masks, no learning a second application.

What you're trading

I'd be doing this differently, and it's worth being honest about what that means. Doing it by hand in Photoshop gives you control over every pixel, and if the picture really matters, that control is the reason to learn it. Handing it to Firefly means accepting whatever it decides to give you, and sometimes that'll be a couple of goes before you get something you're happy with.

For a lot of pictures, though, that's a fine trade. You get the photo you wanted, in the software you already use, in about two minutes.

Have a watch of the video above if you'd rather see it happen than read about it. It goes quicker than it sounds.

The Westcott Photography Wagon

Today, Westcott have announced the Photography Wagon!

It's a collapsible rolling gear cart AND light stand built specifically for photographers and filmmakers, it's available from today, and it's priced at $189.90 in the US and £159 + VAT in the UK

The walk from the car

Every “on location” photographer can relate to this; light stand under one arm, camera bag on your back, softbox in the other hand, and a backdrop that won't sit comfortably under anything. Then you get to where you're setting up and realise the batteries are still in the boot.

So you go back, and more often than not you go back again.

That's the problem this thing exists to solve, and I like that Westcott have gone after it rather than after another light. At the Wex roadshows this summer I've been carrying the X-Drop Pro, my vintage grey backdrop, an FJ250, the 36 inch Octa and a stand, and none of that is heavy on its own … it's just awkward.

The boom pole is the point

Plenty of people already use a wagon. I've seen no end of photographers turn up at conferences with a cart but what makes this one a photography wagon, rather than just a wagon, is the boom pole which also drops into a holster built into the frame and locks so it won't rotate.

It gets up to 7ft 8in, about 2.3 metres, and it'll take 13 pounds on the end of it, so roughly 6 kilos; easily an FJ400 and a decent sized softbox.

The pole comes out and works as a handheld boom too, and there's a soft grip section on it, which is useful if you're shooting somebody on steps and want the light coming down at them.

And it isn't only for lights; you could also attach a reflector for example or even a tethering table.

What it actually holds

175 pounds, which is about 79kg. The cart itself weighs 24 pounds, near enough 11kg.

The sides are fabric panels that fold over onto hook and loop tape and hide the frame, so the thing looks like a piece of professional kit rather than something off the beach. There's a fold down tailgate at the back for anything long, a C stand say, so it can sit out the end. Grab and go pockets on the sides, and the bottom has a thicker section of padding sewn into the middle of it, which is the sort of detail you only appreciate after you've put a heavy light down hard.

The front two wheels have friction brakes. They still swivel when they're locked, so it's the rolling that stops, not the steering.

Setting it up is a handful of movements: open the two sides, fold the fabric panels over, press the hook and loop down, drop the boom pole into the holster. Collapsing it is the same in reverse. That's it.

It doesn't care whose lights you own

Worth saying plainly, because it's a bit unusual for a Westcott product. There's nothing here that ties you to their lighting. Any brand's stands, any brand's bags, and any brand's light on the end of that boom.

So if you shoot Godox, or Profoto, or anything else entirely, it works exactly the same for you as it will for me.

Mine is en route

So this is a post about a product I've been shown by the folks at Westcott, rather than one I've rolled across a car park or a beach but it is en route, so when it turns up I'll do a proper video with it because for me, this is going to be incredibly useful when out photographing for my I am Lyme project, when on my own.

Iron Clothes in Photoshop in 30 Seconds

Almost every conversation I see about AI and photography is about generating things that were never in the frame in the first place, and that's never been the part that interests me. What I actually care about is getting time back. The small distractions that were out of my control on the day, the ones that used to cost me twenty minutes with the healing brush, can now be sorted cleanly in seconds with the texture still intact.

Wrinkled clothing and folded backdrops are the two that come up again and again. So here's how I deal with both.

The orange t shirt

First job on this one was a distracting logo on the shirt, and for that I go straight to the Remove Tool. The setting worth knowing about is Auto, which lets Photoshop work out for itself whether it needs standard content aware fill or whether it needs to reach for generative AI. On a simple cleanup like a small logo it'll usually just handle it locally, which means you're not burning generative processing on something that didn't need it.

With the logo gone, the creases were the bigger problem, and that's a three step job.

Make a loose selection around the whole shirt with the standard Lasso Tool. Nothing precious about it, loose is fine. Then open Generative Fill from the contextual taskbar and pick the Firefly Image 5 model, which in my experience is much better at editing what's already there and preserving fine detail than it is at inventing things you didn't ask for. Then type a clear prompt: "remove the creases from off the orange t shirt".

That's it.

What comes back has the harsh creases gone but the natural drape still there, along with the shadows and the weave of the fabric. It still looks like a t shirt someone was actually wearing, which is the whole point.

That slightly crispy edge, and the Quick Mask fix

The second example was a branded white t shirt, and that's a bit more involved because you want a proper selection rather than a loose lasso.

The Object Selection Tool is quick here, and using Select People and then Upper Clothes gets you there in a couple of clicks. The catch is that it can leave a hard, slightly crispy edge, and you tend to notice it most around the neckline where the shirt meets skin.

In Adobe Camera Raw and in Lightroom there are dedicated Feather and Edge sliders for AI masks, which sort this out instantly. Photoshop doesn't have those in the main workspace at the moment, so you need a workaround, and the one I use is Quick Mask.

Make your selection with the Object Selection Tool, then tap Q to drop into Quick Mask Mode. Go to Filter, then Blur, then Gaussian Blur, and put in something small; I'm usually somewhere between 1 and 1.2 pixels. Tap Q again to come out.

That tiny bit of blur softens the boundary between the mask and the skin so the transition reads as natural rather than cut out.

Being specific is the whole game

This is the bit I'd underline if I were underlining anything.

Generative Fill still needs a clear instruction even when you've made a precise selection. If you type "remove the creases" and nothing else, more often than not you'll get nothing back at all, because the model hasn't been given enough to go on.

Prompt it with "remove the creases from off the white t shirt" instead and it knows exactly what it's looking at and what you want doing. The folds go, the printed typography stays where it was, and the grain of the fabric survives.

It feels fussy the first couple of times. It stops feeling fussy the moment you see the difference.

The same thing works on backdrops

Studio backgrounds are the other one, and the workflow is identical.

Select your subject with Select and then Subject, then invert it with Select and then Inverse so it's the background you're working on rather than the person. Soften that boundary with the same Quick Mask and Gaussian Blur trick, which matters more here than anywhere else because of hair and shoulders.

Then in Generative Fill, be even more specific than you think you need to be. Something like: "remove the creases from off the grey background. do not change the look of the grey background. keep the texture etc."

Those extra instructions are doing real work. Without them you can end up with a background that's been quietly smoothed into a flat, artificial gradient, and you've lost the character of the thing entirely. With them, the fold lines from a portable backdrop like the Westcott Vintage Grey X-Drop Pro disappear and the texture stays exactly as it was.

None of this is compulsory

I'm not telling anyone they have to work this way. If you enjoy retouching every fold by hand, and plenty of people genuinely do, there's nothing wrong with that at all and the results will be lovely.

But if you'd rather spend less of your life sat in front of an editing screen and more of it on the actual photography, using these tools deliberately, on the boring problems rather than to invent things that were never there, is a big win.

Early Morning Swimmers, a Man Called Neptune and Matching the Shadows

I was down on the beach at Lyme Regis at 7 yesterday morning for the next set of portraits for my “I am Lyme” project, this time with early morning sea swimmers, Mary and Christine; Mary runs the Axminster and Lyme Regis Cancer Support, and Christine, an artist and also the wife of Harry May, one of the fishermen I photographed a good few weeks back.

Waiting for them to come out

Low tide had been at around half four, and we were shooting at seven, so the sea was on its way back in but still a fair way out, so I waited until they'd had their swim and photographed the two of them together right on the water's edge, wet hair and robes.

Christine and Mary

My dear friend Steve Healy came along to help out and did a top job holding the light, which meant I could spend the time talking to Mary and Christine rather than fiddling about with a stand.

And then Neptune turned up

This is the part I couldn't have planned.

While we were shooting, Mary and Christine spotted a chap they knew coming out of the sea and pointed him out to me; Nick, known affectionately as Neptune, another early morning sea swimmer that has done so pretty much his entire life of 83 years; yeah I know what you’re thinking “He’s 83??” Yep, looks amazing huh. I guess there’s something in this sea swimming.

Nick aka Neptune

Anyway, they called him over and he was keen from the off, which always helps. For him though it had to be in the water, because anywhere else would have been wrong, so it was trainers off, trousers rolled up and in I went. Mary took over the light for that one, stood in the sea alongside me, and it was done in a handful of frames.

What I used

• the Westcott FJ800 strobe

• the Westcott Rapid Box, 3ft by 4ft softbox

• the Fujifilm X-T5 with the 33mm f/1.4 WR lens

• the Westcott XT1-M wireless trigger

That's the lot, and you'll notice there's no neutral density filter on that list.

The settings, and why there's no ND filter

Normally on the seafront I'd have one on to keep the shutter speed within sync while I'm shooting wide open, and to hold on to the detail in the sky. This morning was properly overcast though, so the sky was doing nothing dramatic and there was nothing to rescue. The grey did the job for me.

My Fujifilm X-T5 was in Manual with the following settings used to “set the scene” …

1/160 sec, f/4, ISO 100, with the 33mm giving me roughly the 50mm equivalent on the X-T5.

For the flash, the FJ800 went into TTL first, purely to get the exposure right on the skin, and once it was there I locked it in using the TTL to manual function, which I keep banging on about. From that point on it fires exactly the same every single frame, so nothing shifts as I move around or recompose. It takes seconds to do, and on a morning when your subjects have just got out of the sea, seconds matter.

Matching the shadows, which is the bit most people miss

The softbox was in as close as I could physically get it, just out of frame, and that was a deliberate decision rather than habit.

When you're using flash outdoors, most of the attention goes on balancing the flash with the ambient, so the two brightnesses sit together and it doesn't look lit. That's only half of it. You also have to match the quality of the light, meaning the shadows your flash makes need to look like the shadows already in the scene, whether those are hard or soft.

Yesterday morning was flat and overcast, so the light on everything around us was very soft, with shadows that were barely there. If I'd lit Mary and Christine with something small, or with a big modifier pulled back a long way, I'd have put a harder shadow on their faces than anything else in the frame had. The eye picks that up straight away, even when the person looking can't tell you what's wrong with it. It's one of the biggest giveaways that a flash was used.

So a 3ft by 4ft box, in tight, giving light almost as soft as the morning itself. On a hard, bright day I'd want the opposite, something that puts a shadow on the face with an edge to it, because that's what the sun is doing to everything else.

It's worth paying as much attention to that as you do to which modifier you own. Same softbox, wrong distance, and the picture tells on you.

BIG Thanks to Steve for holding the light all morning, to Mary for taking over when I waded in, and to Christine and Nick for being so game about the whole thing.

Latest Wex Roadshow Locations and Something That Stuck With Me

The last few days took me out on the road for the next two dates of the Wex Photo Video Roadshow, first at Milton Keynes and then up to Nottingham. Two very different days, and both of them a lot of fun.

Milton Keynes was the testing one. It's a relatively small store, so there was no space indoors to set up for my bit showing how I take portraits with minimal kit in a small space, which meant being out the front of the store, under a gazebo, in 34 degrees.

Working under a gazebo in the sun

It was hot, and on top of that we had the sun shifting round through the day and bright light coming in under the edge of the gazebo.

So the light was never quite the same for very long.

I had good company out there though, with my friend Carly from BenQ UK and my friend Dominic from Epson both under the gazebo with me.

Carly from BenQ UK

I actually really enjoyed it; it kept me on my toes and it kept making me adapt, and more than that, it showed something I think is worth showing; whatever the environment, you can still make a good portrait … you just work with what you've got in front of you.

It was good to be able to talk people through the technical side of that, but also the other half of it, which is how I zone in on somebody so that all their focus is on me; voice, mannerisms, the way I talk to someone while I’m working. That's what helps them relax.

The people who sat in front of the camera

I wasn't photographing models over the two days, II was photographing whoever had come along and wanted to know more about what I do, which for me, is always the better way to do it.

My friend Mick Hampson came along at Milton Keynes and I got a portrait of him that he’s really happy with. There was also a lady called Deborah, a photographer herself, who hates having her picture taken, but she's seen her portrait since getting home and she's really pleased with it, which is just wonderful to hear.

Mick with one of the other portraits I took of him

Then after Milton Keynes I had a lovely dinner with good friends Mick and Ian Munro before setting off up the road to Nottingham.

Nottingham, and the luxury of air conditioning

Nottingham is a much bigger store, so this time I was actually inside, with air conditioning, which after the day before, that felt like a proper treat.

Great day again, and lots of pictures taken, including one of a member of staff called Sam.

I distinctly remember a lovely guy by the name of Kevin, who came along and told me straight out that he doesn't think he's very photogenic.

We got a black and white portrait of him looking away from the camera, a bit moodier, a bit more contemplative, which he's now seen and he's really happy with.

He said in an email reply that it's encouraged him to want to get back into taking portraits himself.

That sort of thing is why I do these days.

The bit that stayed with me

There was a chap at Nottingham who'd clearly been doing photography a long time. We got talking, and I invited him to take a seat so I could photograph him. His wife sat down instead, which was lovely.

While we were there, a friend of his came over and said to him, “oh, I'm surprised you're here, you already know how to do all this”, and he meant the setup, the lighting, all the technical side of it.

That stuck with me, because that's not what portrait photography is about.

Yes, it's important to have nice light on someone, light that complements them or creates the mood you're after, but the most important thing of all is the person in front of the camera.

Somewhere along the line, that chap's priorities had turned a hundred and eighty degrees, and the kit and the setup had ended up mattering more than the person sat in the chair.

It's the point I made over both days, and it's the one I'd want anyone to take away from this:

“If someone looks uncomfortable on camera, they will look uncomfortable in good light and in bad light. It makes no difference. So helping them become comfortable is the most important thing of all.”

Portrait, retouch, print, all in one go

The thing I enjoyed most over the two days was being able to show the whole process end to end, and that came down to teaming up with BenQ and Epson.

At Milton Keynes it worked like this…

I'd take a portrait, then bring everyone round the laptop, which was hooked up to the BenQ SW272U, the same monitor I use day to day at home. I'd talk through the edit as I was doing it, with people stood there watching it happen. Then I'd hand it over to Dominic, who printed it out on a matt fine art paper.

We did the same at Nottingham, although Carly wasn't there for that one, so I was editing on my MacBook Pro screen and then passing the files to Dominic to print.

Somebody could sit for a portrait, watch it being retouched, and then hold a print of themselves in their hands, all within a few minutes. People really loved seeing that hands-on, and clearly something people want more of.

The kit

Nothing complicated, and all of it small enough to go in the car for two locations:

• Fujifilm X-T5 and GFX 100S II

• Westcott FJ100 strobe

• Westcott Rapid Box Switch, the medium Octa

• Westcott X-Drop Pro background

That's the lot, and portability was the whole point of it.

The new FJ100 Storebe from Westcott perfromed flawlessly … and didn’t need a signle charge. In fact I doubt I’ll be charging it for the remaining tour dates.

---

where I'm off to next

Both teams at Milton Keynes and Nottingham were incredibly engaging and so welcoming, and there was a real buzz about both days, so a HUGE thank you to them.

Norwich is next, later this week; quite a drive for me but I’m really looking forward to it, so if you’re in the area … I’ll see you there ( LINK )

I am Lyme - Group Portrait on Victoria Pier

If you're ever in Lyme Regis and you happen to be on the Cobb at 7.35 in the morning, you'll meet these gentlemen. Seven days a week, come rain or shine, they're there.

Each of them is very well known in Lyme. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard people talk about this group, how good they are for one another and how good they are for the town. More than once someone has said to me that if you ever needed help, these would be the first men stepping forward.

If you walk past them, all you'll hear is laughter. That morning walk is their own little bit of therapy, their own bit of escape, their own way of putting the world to rights. Whenever they stop and speak to somebody it's as if they've known them for years, and you always come away feeling better for it.

I'd wanted to photograph these men as a group for a good while to include in my "I am Lyme" project, because to me they really do represent Lyme Regis.

I was out with my great friend on Saturday morning and we happened to be on the Cobb, and sure enough, there they were. I stopped and explained about the project and they were more than keen, making jokes amongst themselves about getting their hair done and sorting out the makeup.

The following morning I went back, without telling them I'd be there.

I'd arranged to photograph Jason first ( LINK ) , so once that was done I carried my kit down to the far end of the Cobb, right by Victoria Pier. If you ever visit and go out on a sea fishing trip, that's the bit where you get on the boat.

The kit was simple. Flash on a stand with my 3ft by 4ft softbox, and I had the softbox positioned horizontally because I knew I wanted to spread the light right across the group rather than have it drop off at either end. My back was to the sun, and so was the back of the softbox. Then I sat down next to it all and waited.

At 7.35, they turned up.

I walked over to one of the guys, John, who happens to be the brother of Harry May, who I photographed a few weeks back for the project. I said, "John, I said I'd be here. How do you fancy doing the group portrait now?"

Two test shots, four frames, done. It took a couple of minutes at most, because the last thing I wanted was to hold up their walk.

As we were shooting, the wind picked up a bit and the stand needed some support, so I grabbed a volunteer from the group of people waiting to go out on a fishing trip. I never got his name, but he did a sterling job of holding everything steady.

I packed up and was about to head off to Town Mill for some breakfast, and I turned back to the guys and said, "Have a great day, and I'll see you soon with a print" , and each of them called out "Thank you Glyn" ,"Cheerio Glyn" , "See you soon Glyn"

I'd said my name once and each of them remembered it. I walked away with a beaming smile on my face.

This coming Tuesday I'm heading down to The Cobb nice and early to sit at the end of the Cobb by Victoria Pier with a coffee, and just wait for these great guys to turn up so I can hand them each their own print.

I cannot wait.

Camera Raw 18.5: New Blemish Removal + What Adobe Got Wrong

Camera Raw 18.5 landed on the 4th August, and alongside the usual long list of small tweaks there are three additions worth knowing about. Two of them are quick admin jobs. The third is a brand new portrait tool that genuinely changes how retouching works inside Camera Raw.

One thing to get out of the way first. All three are Camera Raw only at the moment. They aren't in Lightroom Desktop or Lightroom Classic yet. Camera Raw is the processing engine sitting underneath the whole Lightroom family, so new features tend to turn up there first and then work their way across to everything else. If you've got Photoshop, you can start using all of this today through the Camera Raw Filter, on raw files, JPEGs, TIFFs, or an individual layer.

Turning the generative AI features off

If you enter competitions, or you deliver to clients who want to know nothing generative has been near their files, or you'd simply rather not have those tools sitting there in front of you, you can now switch them off completely.

Open Preferences, the settings icon, go to the Generative AI tab and uncheck Enable Generative AI Features. That's it.

What it turns off is the three tools that make brand new pixels out of thin air. What it leaves alone is Denoise, Super Resolution and the standard Remove tool, because none of those are generative.

One thing to watch. The setting is per machine, so if you work on a desktop and a laptop you'll need to turn it off on both.

Two small additions to the vectorscope

If you use the vectorscope for colour work, and you'll find it by right clicking the histogram and choosing Show Vectorscope, there are two new options in there.

You can now line Red up at 3 o'clock, which matches the layout video editors have been using for years. And you can toggle on LAB values so you're reading actual numbers rather than eyeballing it, which is handy when you're matching skin tones across a whole shoot rather than one frame.

Small stuff, but if you're already living in the vectorscope you'll appreciate both.

The new Blemish Removal

This is the headline addition, and it lives inside the Remove panel under a new section called Distraction Removal, then Blemishes.

Click Apply and it runs an automatic first pass across the face. That one click gets you a decent way there, but only a decent way. The bit that actually matters is understanding what the two sliders underneath are doing, because they're doing two very different jobs.

Amount, for the temporary stuff

The Amount slider deals with temporary marks. Spots, breakouts, the things that would have cleared up on their own in a fortnight anyway.

At 100 it removes every temporary mark it can find. As you bring it down, the smaller and subtler marks come back first while the more prominent ones stay hidden. Sitting somewhere in the middle is usually where you want to be, because it clears the angry breakout without stripping the skin of its normal texture and leaving you with that plastic look nobody wants.

Fade, and the default I'd change every time

The Fade slider handles permanent features. Moles, beauty spots, freckles. The things that are part of someone's face rather than something that turned up last Tuesday.

Adobe has set the default for Fade at 50.

I've got a real problem with that. At 50, Camera Raw is fading a client's natural moles and beauty spots halfway out before you've touched a single control. Nobody asked it to. You open the file, and a piece of software has quietly made a decision about somebody's face on your behalf.

So the habit I'd get into is this. Every time you open a portrait, drag Fade down to 0 before you do anything else. Look at the face as it actually is, then decide. If the client has asked you to soften a mole, fine, soften it. But make that an intentional choice you've made, not a default you didn't notice.

Refine, for the bits it gets wrong

Clicking Refine gives you a brush with two modes.

Restore brings back something the tool has taken out that you wanted to keep, a character mark or a scar it's decided to tidy away. Remove clears anything the automatic pass has missed.

Between those two you can get any face exactly where you want it in under a minute.

If you're working on a group shot you can pick individual faces, or select All People and do the lot in one go. I'd be careful with All People, though. The same Amount and Fade settings applied to a teenager and a grandparent rarely work for both, and you'll usually be better off going face by face.

Texture is only half the job

Here's the bit that gets missed, and it's the difference between a retouch that looks finished and one that doesn't quite.

There are two separate problems on a spot. There's texture, which is the raised physical bump on the skin, and there's tone, which is the red patch sitting underneath and around it.

The Blemishes tool is excellent on texture. It does nothing at all about tone.

Think of it like makeup. The Blemishes tool is the concealer, covering the bump. You still need a base to even out the colour underneath. Skip that step and you're left with red blotches on otherwise clean skin, and those often pull the eye harder than the original breakout did, because now there's nothing else there to explain them.

Fixing the tone with Point Color

The temptation is to build a skin selection and shift the colour globally, but that moves the whole face just to fix a few patches. A localised brush is much better behaved.

1. grab a standard masking brush with a soft, feathered edge and paint over only the red, blotchy areas

2. inside the brush mask settings, open Point Color

3. take the eyedropper and click on an area of clean, healthy skin nearby, which tells Camera Raw what colour that red patch is supposed to be

4. widen the Variance slider

That last one is where it happens. Expanding Variance pulls the surrounding red tones smoothly towards your clean sample, so the patchwork evens out without anything else on the face moving.

So, next time you open a portrait

Run Blemishes, pull Fade to 0 and decide for yourself what stays, then set Amount somewhere sensible rather than pinning it at 100.

Then brush the red areas and use Point Color to bring the tone back in line.

The whole thing takes a couple of minutes inside one dialogue box. No healing layers, no frequency separation, no round trip into Photoshop and back. For anyone who's put off retouching because it always felt like a job that needed a stack of layers and half an hour, this is a lovely way in.

Photographing "Beach House Café Jason" for I am Lyme

I was up and out at 4.30 last Sunday morning to take an early morning sunrise photograph of a chap called Jason down on the seafront for my "I Am Lyme" project.

Jason is a well known face around Lyme Regis. Everyone knows him and everyone comments about him being such a kind, gentle soul. We chose The Beach House Cafe right on the front as the place to photograph him as he’s great friends of the owners.

I've seen him loads of times, always a “Good morning”, and the odd bit of chat, nothing much more than that, but I've wanted to photograph him for a good while.

Turns out somebody else I'm shooting for the project soon had already mentioned it to him. So on the Saturday, when I was out with my friend Steve Healy and we happened to see him, we got chatting about the project and I asked him there and then. He was more than happy to be involved, and it was Jason who suggested six o'clock the following morning. So that's what we did.

Sitting down before picking the camera up

I got down there good and early and was set up by 5.30am, and before I even picked the camera up we sat and chatted, talking about all sorts.

That's when he told me he isn't originally from Lyme Regis; he's from Southampton, and a few years ago he was cycling round the world, all over India and Thailand, and he was making his way round the UK when he stopped off here and never left. He got the job at the cafe pretty much the next day and has run it ever since for the elderly couple who own it.

At one point in the conversation he also opened up about some fairly serious medical problems he's had to deal with in the not too distant past. It's not my story to tell so I'll leave it there, but it really struck me … you just never know what somebody has been through.

Taking the portraits

Once he'd finished setting up, that's when we started taking some portrait shots; all very slow paced with no rush at all, which was lovely.

It was genuinely a completely relaxing experience and that's exactly what I'm loving about the "I Am Lyme" project, much the same as I did with the veterans work. By sitting and chatting with people you get to know them a bit, you understand them a bit more, and I genuinely believe that comes through when you take their portrait.

The thing that really got me though was how many people said good morning to him while we were stood there. I honestly lost count. Everybody knows Jason.

The kit I used

Nothing complicated, and nothing I haven't used a hundred times before:

• Fujifilm X-T5

• Fujifilm XF 33mm f/1.4 R LM WR

• Westcott FJ800

• Westcott Rapid Box Switch Octa, 3ft x 4ft

• Westcott XT-1M remote trigger

• Tethered into Capture One Mobile on the iPad

Settings were ISO 100, f/4.0 and 1/125 sec.

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TTL to manual, and why I keep banging on about it

The flash side of it is the bit worth explaining, because it's the thing that makes a shoot like this so much calmer than it sounds.

It works like this.

I set the flash to TTL and take a frame, and the flash works out for itself what it reckons is the perfect exposure. All I have to do then is nudge it up or down on the dial on the remote until it's where I want it, and use the TTL to Manual function to lock that power in.

That's it. Pretty much one shot and the flash exposure is bang on and we're good to go.

From then on the flash fires at exactly the same power every single frame, so nothing is quietly drifting about while I'm working, and that's really the whole point of it for me. It keeps the technical side of the photography simple and quick, so as a portrait photographer my time gets spent engaging with the person in front of my camera instead of being distracted by the tech.

For anyone who's been put off by the idea of manual flash, it's a lovely way in as well, because you're letting the flash do the maths and then simply keeping the answer.

The ambient was the interesting part that morning.

The rising sun was over to camera right and it kept appearing and then going back behind the clouds, so the light was changing every couple of minutes. Rather than chase it, I set my camera for the ambient with the sun behind cloud and then only took photographs when it was behind cloud. Wait, shoot, wait again.

It sounds like a faff but it isn't. It meant the ambient light was consistent, and because the flash power was locked in manual, that was consistent too. Same background, same light on his face, frame after frame.

The print

I'll be getting Jason's print to him in the next few days, which is the bit of this project I look forward to most. Handing somebody a print of themselves in person is a very different thing to sending them a file, and it's become the part of "I Am Lyme" that I wouldn't skip for anything.

I’ll make sure to grab a picture of Jason with his print and share it.