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1 August 2026

We've just archived Volume 15, Number 7 of Photo Corners on the Archive page with 12 Features, 8 commented News stories, 27 Editor's Notes (which included 129 items of interest), 3 reviews and 1 site note for a total of 51 stories.

Eighteen of those stories included 135 images. We noted one holiday and published three stories with gear specification tables for new products.

We've noticed a number of sites we regularly cite in Editor's Notes have been quiet for longer lately, publishing once a week or less. Or even going silent. And we've been unable to find any new sites with anything interesting to follow.

A shrinking industry, in short.

READERSHIP NUMBERS are still inflated by bot visits. Files downloaded, for example, increased to 12,259,387 from 8,781,156 the previous month. Still that's less than April's high of well over 14 million.

We notice a marked decrease in traffic since July 22, perhaps as Sonic, which hosts our site, gets a handle on the problem.

We notice a marked decrease in traffic since July 22, perhaps as Sonic, which hosts our site, gets a handle on the problem.

TOP STORIES were the SFMOMA report on new photography acquisitions followed closely by our own Adobe Indigo story on AI Playground and then three Horns.

But there really wasn't a great deal of difference in readership numbers between the older stories of the month, which accounted for two thirds of July's offerings. That's pretty much the way it's been as readers catch up on things at their leisure.

Still the very newest story had just a bit more than half of the most popular story from two weeks ago. So a sizeable number of readers are catching the wave.

WE'VE PUBLISHED THREE REVIEWS this month after being unable to publish any for two months. They all involve aspects of Indigo's new AI Playground, which Adobe provided us access to after the announcement.

The reviews addressed quite different aspects of the software as well as long-standing common concerns: converting a negative to a positive in camera, converting a capture to a pen and wash drawing, converting a capture to a watercolor. Each merited its own discussion.

Adobe has, for a while now, found ways to harness artificial intelligence to do things that were previously torture. Masking hair is still something that gives us the chills but it represents the difficulty of making selections in general. Now more than one high-end image editing software can do object selection.

But it's that kind of thing that makes AI welcome in this industry.

With Indigo, we are getting some of that power into our capture devices. Don't expect to see that trickle up to dSLRs or mirrorless camera systems, though. You shoot a negative with those, you get a negative. Download and post process it to convert it to a positive. No immediate feedback possible.

As the poet once wrote, "Two roads diverged..."


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