We find these useful. You might, too.
1. Photrus. Number one on our list of tools that help us create our artwork is https://www.photrus.com/ As I said in my review of Photrus, this may be the biggest no-brainer in all of landscape photography. I love TPE [more below] and pay for but just tolerate PhotoPils [don't be a hater]. But there is nothing else like Photrus. What Christian Irmler has built is unavailable anywhere else. You might be able to cobble together all the data necessary from other sources to produce what Photrus generates effortlessly [for you], but you would spend hours, if not days, trying to do so. Even if you employed OpenAI or Claude or Perplexity, you would not have the rock-solid reliability that Photrus offers.
2.. TPE. I don't know anybody who calls it by its rightful name, The Photographer's Ephermeris. Everyone I know calls it TPE.
3. Capture One. Some people love Lightroom—and I respect it begrudgingly, but I will not use it ever again, ever since it lured me into mistakenly deleting a boatload of original files from the Maldives and Bali; that was my doing, but trust me, LR lured me—and some swear by DxO PureRAW, but for me, it is Capture One. And as long as I am shooting a Phase One camera, it always will be. At one time, perhaps a little as 2-3 years ago (I am writing this in 2026), its color science was superior to every other RAW processor out there, primarily because it was built from early on to handle 16-bit files. But the competition has been catching up. I'm not so sure that, if you process a file out of a Leica, or Nikon, or Sony, or Canon, or Fuji, that you will perceive a dramatic rendition difference.
What is different is that only C1 can process the RAW files from a Phase One digital back correctly. And that's where the magic happens. What's wonderful about those images. C1 may not be a full-blown pixel editor the way Photoshop is, but you can actually achieve 50% or more of your desired edits with its tools. For some p[eople, there may be no need to employ Photoshop.
Conversely, one significant downside to C1 is that, if you shoot a Hasselblad digital camera, C1 will not process those files. These two companies have been doing at each other like high school teenagers for years. And it's a shame. If you do shoot a Hasselblad 9we don't anymore, but might again), and you want to use C1, get yourself a batch EXIF editor. All you have to do is change a couple of letters in the EXIF files, and C1 will open DNG files made by Hasselblad.
4. Photoshop. I used to loath working in Photoshop, and that was only because of its complexity and depth. it intimidated me, and I suppose it still does. But there really is nothing else that can compete with its capabilities. There are in fact other software offerings that can do a lot of Photoshop does, and there are several that offer more attractive pricing. I know there is an entire segment of the photographic community dedicated to hating on Adobe's subscription plans, and I get it.
5.. Boris FX Optics. This is a new addition to our toolkit. I had known about Boris FX for several years—there are lots of other tools on their platform but Optics is the one for still photographers—ever since a webinar with the French photographic-artist David Duschens. But I was initially turned off by the kludgy platform and candidly, the price.
6. Luminar Neo. Skyrim is the company that develops and markets Luminar Neo. This pixel-editor has been through a lot of twists and turns over the years. But out has eventually evolved into something quite useful. Its creative editing tools are quite good, and even if you used it as nothing more than a "trial balloon floater," it would be worth the price. But, you really have to be aware of its limitations. Even in this day and age of everyone slapping "AI" on their toolkit, Luminar Neo comes up short in a few respects that you can