Shutter Happens – Issue #006

Hey guys. Welcome along to the latest edition of Shutter Happens, my newsletter covering everything that’s happening in the world of photography or at least everything I think is interesting in the world of photography.

Adobe Create Expensive New Creative Cloud Tier – Automatically Move Everyone Onto It

Subscribers to Adobe’s top of the range subscription plan with be charged 17% more starting from June 17th thanks to the introduction of new Firefly AI features. Everyone currently on the annual (monthly) $59.99USD ‘Creative Cloud All Apps’ plan will be moved to a rebranded ‘Creative Cloud Pro’ plan with an annual (monthly) $69.99USD fee.

The change is being made to accomodate the cost of the recently updated Firefly AI features, whether the customer uses them or not. According to Adobe the new plan is aimed at “integrating generative AI-powered capabilities across Creative Cloud and through our new Firefly app that make you more productive.”

If you don’t want to use Firefly, on the basis that it’s a load of shit, or because you have no interest in AI slop at all, then you can opt for a new non-AI plan called ‘Creative Cloud Standard’ which costs $55 annual (monthly). But if you do, then you can kiss goodbye to access to the web and mobile apps, because they’re not included in that subscription tier – and if that’s not peak Adobe, then I don’t know what is. Full details here.

Google ‘Partners’ with Skylum to Port Luminar to Android

Love it or hate it, Luminar is a popular photo editor which, up until now has only been available on Windows, Mac and iOS devices. But now Android users can also turn their perfectly nice photos into heavily edited fantasy composites because Luminar is now available on Android and ChromeOS ecosystems.

Luminar famously leans heavily on AI for photo edits and this is in perfect alignment with Google’s adoption of AI-with-everything.

Maria Schmidt, the Strategic Partnership Manager at Google said, “This partnership showcases the potential of AI to enhance creativity and simplify complex tasks for users across different devices.”

All of the Luminar AI goodness has been ported over to Android, including Enhance AI, Structure AI, Relight AI, Atmosphere AI, Sky AI, Skin AI and Body AI. No word yet on Regret AI, but I’m sure they’re working on it.

The early negative reviews are already in, over at the Google Play store https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.skylum.luminar&hl=en&pli=1

Fujifilm Launch the X Half Influencer Camera

Fujifilm continue to lean heavily into what you might almost call the ‘novelty’ end of the camera market, with their latest release, the X Half.

The gimmick with this camera being its default vertical format, which is obviously designed for folks who upload directly to social media and can’t be bothered to turn their cameras 90º before pressing the shutter button.

The X Half is heavily tricked out with on-trend analog fakery including all the usual Fuji film simulations, but also features unique to this camera such as halation effects.

Available in silver, black and charcoal colours, in the now-traditional range-finder style, the X Half will retail at $1400 here in Australia or $849 in the US.

Adobe Stock Just Ticked Over the 50% A.I. Mark

In April 2023 I uploaded a video to my YouTube channel titled “A.I. Is Going to Destroy the Stock Photography Market (And It’s Coming For Your Porn Too!)” in which I gave my predictions for how the stock photography scene would evolve in a post-AI world.

The main effect AI has had on stock photography in the subsequent years is to drive its value to a statistically meaningless decimal value above zero. These days everyone just heads over to Sora, Midjourney and Canva or, if they’re desperate – Adobe Firefly – and generates their images without a backward glance at the stock libraries.

And now the AI takeover is complete because not only have the generative imaging platforms taken over, but some of the stock libraries have also been flooded with other people’s AI generated images.

Over on this blog, Robert Kneschke reported that in calendar week 19 this year, the number of AI images in the Adobe Stock portfolio was almost 50%
(specifically it was 47.85% on April 8, 2025).

Fuelled, no doubt, by get-rich-quick videos on YouTube in which breathless content-creators show you how to make big bucks flogging AI slop to Adobe, the number of AI generated images has exploded. Whether anyone’s stupid enough to pay to download those images instead of just making their own is anyone’s guess.

As Robert explains on his blog, In just three
years, almost as many AI images were uploaded to Adobe Stock as “normal” works in twenty years since Adobe Stock (formerly Fotolia) existed as a whole.