Last week review 10-2026

Weekly review 10-2026: This week was very warm, almost summery, with blue skies and nearly 11 hours of sunshine – making us look forward to more 😉

This week’s article was about the release of Adobe Lightroom Classic versions 15.2 and 9.2. Besides the usual stability improvements and, of course, support for newer cameras, Lightroom Classic also supports the WebP format, but only for importing, not for further editing. Surprisingly, a new feature from Topaz, called Topaz Gigapixel, has now been introduced in Lightroom Desktop (the original mobile version, not Lightroom Classic).

This feature is not yet available in Lightroom Classic. Topaz Gigapixel can upscale photos by a factor of 2 or 4. However, this uses the credits typically required for an Adobe subscription, which are needed for AI applications.

I tried it out once in Lightroom Desktop, and the results are quite satisfactory. It’s surprising that Adobe implemented yet another, practically identical function alongside the existing Super Resolution feature, which is also available in Lightroom Classic.

I couldn’t find that this function, Topaz Gigapixel, was in any way superior to, for example, the Super Resolution function. What was annoying, however, was that the credits for using these features weren’t deducted from my photography subscription (the one with 20 GB remaining), and after a few attempts, Adobe told me I had to upgrade to a premium subscription to continue using this tool. That’s the catch with these applications: you can’t simply buy additional credits for a special project, for example, or only through an additional subscription, which is correspondingly expensive. All in all, there wasn’t much new to report with the release of the new versions of Lightroom and Lightroom Classic.

But then, of course, there’s news from Apple. Apple has unveiled the MacBook Neo, a laptop with an introductory price of under €700. To compensate for this lower price, Apple has naturally cut corners, equipping the new MacBook Neo with the chip from the iPhone 16. This is certainly sufficient for most office applications, as well as email, web browsing, watching videos, and so on. However, unlike the MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs with their M5 chips, Apple has, in a sense, taken a step backward, as this MacBook Neo only comes with 8 GB of RAM. That will likely be insufficient in many cases.

This week also saw the unveiling of the new Leitzphone, a collaboration with Xiaomi. In my opinion, it’s a massively overpriced smartphone, priced at nearly €2000, which is supposed to improve mobile photography. While it’s true that all smartphones have now reached impressive levels of quality, this particular model… Nevertheless, smartphones clearly have a decisive advantage, namely in sensor size. This makes it almost impossible to isolate subjects from a background, unless this is artificially achieved with AI.

All in all, another very eventful week. I hope you enjoyed the articles and look forward to your questions and comments.

ciao tuxoche