iPhoto News: Photoshop’s Light Layer & Ricoh’s 40mm GR — September 2026

Welcome to the first iPhoto News of September, and this has turned out to be a fortnight about the everyday business of taking pictures rather than about cameras none of us can afford.

Adobe quietly changed the way Photoshop handles light, the UK government managed to confuse everybody about whether you are allowed to photograph people in public, and Ricoh confirmed a compact that a lot of you have been asking after for years.

There are six stories this time, and I have leaned towards the ones that actually change something for you rather than the ones that simply made the loudest headlines. Two of them are worth acting on this week, and the rest are worth knowing about.

Put the kettle on and let us get into it.

Photoshop finally gives light its own layer

On 27 August Adobe announced a long list of Photoshop updates, and the one worth your attention is the new Light Adjustment Layer. It takes the Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks sliders that Camera Raw users have relied on for years and drops them into Photoshop as a proper non-destructive adjustment layer. A few days later a second, much quieter change turned up in Camera Raw itself — a slider called Glow, which spreads light out of the brightest parts of a picture in the way an old diffusion filter used to.

If you have ever brightened a picture in Photoshop and then wished you could dial it back a fortnight later, this is the fix, because an adjustment layer leaves the original pixels untouched and lets you change your mind as often as you like.

Until now that kind of tonal control meant either going back through Camera Raw or committing to the edit and living with it, so having those sliders sitting in the Layers panel alongside Curves and Levels is a genuine convenience rather than a gimmick.

There is nothing to do here except update Photoshop, though I would spend ten minutes putting a Light layer on a picture you finished months ago, because you will be surprised how much detail is still hiding in the highlights. Glow is the one to go carefully with, since a small amount reads as soft, warm light and a large amount reads as a mistake.

Learn Photoshop from scratch

A Home Office booklet muddied the law on photographing people

A nine-page Home Office booklet written as guidance for people newly arrived in the UK, reported on 28 August, told readers that photographing someone without their consent could get them arrested.

The National Union of Journalists said the claim misrepresents the law and risks increased hostility towards photojournalists, because taking a picture of a person in a public place is not in itself unlawful in the UK.

The booklet was quite right that sharing sexual images of someone without their consent is a criminal offence, but it never separated that clearly from ordinary photography, and both Amateur Photographer and Digital Camera World picked the story up on those grounds.

This matters more to hobbyists than it might first appear, because the people who challenge you in the street are rarely lawyers and a government leaflet is exactly the sort of thing that gets quoted back at you. In practice there are very few restrictions on photographing in a public place in the UK, with courtrooms and the 2019 voyeurism law covering upskirting being the obvious exceptions, although the rules do vary from country to country so it pays to know where you stand wherever you shoot.

Knowing the law calmly, and being pleasant about it, defuses almost every confrontation before it has properly started.

Ricoh is building a 40mm version of the GR

Ricoh confirmed on 26 August that it is developing the GR IVx, a version of its pocketable GR compact fitted with a newly designed lens that gives a 40mm equivalent view instead of the GR IV’s 28mm.

It keeps the same 25.7-megapixel sensor, the lens is eight elements in six groups with three aspherical elements, and the aperture runs from F/2.8 to F/16. Ricoh says the camera is due in winter 2026 and has not announced a price.

Forty millimetres is a quietly brilliant focal length, because it sits close to what your eyes take in without effort and it treats people far more kindly than 28mm ever does.

If you have ever found the GR’s wide view forced you to push the camera into somebody’s face to fill the frame, this is the version to wait for, and a development announcement is simply Ricoh’s way of confirming a camera exists before the specification is finished, so expect the details to firm up later in the year.

Wildlife Photographer of the Year showed its hand early

The Natural History Museum released a first selection of images from Wildlife Photographer of the Year on 25 August, drawn from the 100 pictures chosen out of more than 65,000 entries in the competition’s 62nd year.

Among them are Audun Rikardsen’s polar bear staring down a seal’s breathing hole in the Arctic sea ice, and young photographer Jack Crockford’s swift silhouetted against a plane coming in to land at Heathrow. The category winners and the Grand Title are announced on 13 October, and the exhibition opens in London on 16 October.

What strikes me every year is how many of the strongest pictures come out of patience rather than out of expensive glass, and Crockford’s swift is a reminder that a good idea underneath a flight path can beat a fortnight in the Arctic.

Have a proper look through the released images when you get a chance, because working out why a picture won will teach you more about composition and timing than any amount of reading about gear.

A full-frame fisheye that focuses itself, for $449

7Artisans announced the AF 10mm F/2.5 MAX on 26 August, a diagonal fisheye for Sony E, Nikon Z and Leica L cameras with a 185-degree field of view, autofocus, weather sealing and an aviation-grade aluminium barrel, at $449.

It weighs 504g, measures 94mm long, and 7Artisans is releasing a calibration profile so you can straighten the fisheye bend out and use it as a very wide rectilinear lens instead.

Fisheye lenses have always been the sort of thing you borrow rather than buy, because the effect wears thin quickly and the good ones cost far more than the fun really justifies.

At this price, with autofocus and the option to correct the distortion in software, it becomes a much easier thing to own, and it is worth remembering that a fisheye earns its keep in tight spaces — interiors, skateparks, anything you want to shoot from a few inches away — rather than pointed at a landscape.

OM System has a new PEN coming on 9 September

OM System posted a 17-second teaser on 26 August confirming that a new PEN camera will be announced on 9 September.

The video runs through the series history, from the original half-frame PEN of 1959 to the PEN E-P1 that launched Micro Four Thirds in 2009, before finishing on the silhouette of the 2026 model, which looks cleaner and less cluttered than the Olympus PEN-F of 2016. Nothing has been confirmed about the specification or the price.

The last PEN was the E-P7 back in 2021, so this is a series that has been quiet for five years, and a small, good-looking interchangeable-lens camera is very close to what people describe to me when they want something better than a phone but lighter than a full-frame body.

It is worth watching on 9 September, and it says something encouraging about Micro Four Thirds that OM System is reviving the PEN in the same fortnight that Panasonic refreshed three of its Micro Four Thirds lenses.

Final Thoughts

That is your fortnight, and it is a decent one for anybody who had started to think photography news is nothing but cameras you cannot afford. A better way to control light in Photoshop, a compact with a more natural focal length, a cheap fisheye that focuses itself and a competition full of pictures to learn from all matter rather more, in the end, than another specification sheet.

The Home Office story is the one I would keep in your back pocket, because knowing that you are allowed to photograph in a public place, and being able to say so politely, is worth more than any amount of arguing on the pavement.

Tell me in the comments which of these you will actually use, and whether the GR IVx has tempted you or you are holding out to see what the PEN turns out to be.

I will be back in two weeks with the next edition.