In today's episode, another Adobe AI lawsuit, Sigma getting closer to perfecting their full-frame Foveon sensor and YoloLive has released their own prime lens for content creation in the Micro Four Thirds mount.
Show Notes
Welcome back to the show, Liam here and this is Episode 497 of the Liam Photography Podcast for the week of March 11, 2026. In today’s episode Adobe AI lawsuit, Sigma Closer to perfecting their Full Frame Foveon sensor, YoloLiv has an 18mm F/1.4 Micro Four Thirds lens.
The founder of an image archive called Diversity Photos is taking his fight with Adobe public after he attempted to stop the company from training its AI on his rare and valuable library.
Gerald Carter tells PetaPixel that Adobe fed every single image from Diversity Photos into its Firefly AI image model. After he protested, Adobe offered him a paltry fee for the AI training, which Carter rejected. Adobe then relied on its legal resources to successfully thwart Carter’s legal challenge and is now attempting to use the arbitration ruling as precedent for future disputes. The company also sent a process server to Carter’s home.
Carter spent years building up Diversity Photos, which he founded because minority communities have been historically overlooked in stock photography. Carter says the company invested heavily in recruiting real, everyday people and obtained proper consent for the photos.
After launching in 2016, Diversity Photos made strong growth and partnered with Adobe in 2018 via a Stock Contributor Agreement.
“The deal was a revenue-share arrangement,” Carter explains. “We’d supply the content, Adobe would distribute it through Adobe Stock, and we’d both benefit. We granted Adobe a license to distribute and promote our work to their end customers for mutual benefit — it literally says this in the contract.”
But everything changed in March 2023 when Adobe launched its AI model, Firefly, which was marketed as a text-to-image generator that didn’t steal work belonging to creatives. Carter quickly realized that the Diversity Photos archive was in Firefly’s training data and reached out in June 2023, asking to exclude the photos from the dataset and requesting that the two parties establish a licensing arrangement for AI training.
“I was met with months of non-answers,” Carter says. “They told me there were ‘pending decisions’ and to be patient.” In October 2023, Carter was told that the agreement he signed back in 2018 gives Adobe the right to use Diversity Photos as AI training data, confirming that they had used the dataset in at least two AI models, Adobe Sensei and Adobe Firefly.
Carter points out that the entire value proposition of Diversity Photos is its scarcity, along with the quality of the content. If a tech company wants to use the archive to train an AI model, Carter will charge a perpetual license premium.
“So when I found out that Adobe had fed our entire library into their AI training pipeline without asking, without a separate license, without any compensation — it was devastating,” Carter says. “They didn’t just use a few images. They ingested our content and used it to build products that now directly compete with us. Adobe’s AI can now generate the same kind of diverse imagery that we spent years and significant resources creating. They took our competitive advantage and turned it into their feature.”
Carter says it “really stung” when he saw Adobe telling the world that it respected creators’ rights, that it had permission to use the training data, and that contributors could opt out.
“None of that was true in our case. We were never asked. We were never given an opt-out. We were never given a ‘Do Not Train’ option,” Carter says. “Adobe did the exact opposite of what they told the public they were doing.”
To underline just how seriously Carter takes obtaining the correct permissions and licences, he tells PetaPixel that he sent back a five-figure sum to Shutterstock in 2021 after the stock photo company wanted to use Diversity Photos’ images to train its own AI model.
“Our content must be used for good and benefit our community,” Carter explains. “Many people have entrusted us with their likeness and their content — and we must fight for them and creators’ rights.”
After Adobe informed Carter that it had a right to train its AI with Diversity Photos, the company offered $1,173.93 as a bonus fee.
“Not compensation, not a licensing fee — a bonus,” says Carter. “As if they were doing me a favor. And they made it clear they didn’t even believe they were required to pay that under the agreement.”
“This was for nearly 12,000 images used to train AI models that Adobe is now monetizing through subscription fees,” he continues. “I didn’t accept it. I asked for it to be removed from my account because I did not want it to be perceived that we accepted that value at all.”
As well as licensing photos for editorial and commercial purposes, Diversity Photos also licenses its library for AI evaluation purposes, to test a dataset for unwanted biases in AI. A single one-year license can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars. Carter found that $1,173.93 to be an insulting number.
“It showed a fundamental disrespect for the value of what we’d created and the communities we represent,” he says.
But Adobe didn’t budge. Calls and emails went unanswered; he says he was given the runaround. So in January 2024, Carter’s attorney sent a formal demand letter. Adobe once again stated that the original agreement gave them the right to do whatever they wanted with the Diversity Photos archive. So Carter and his attorney filed for arbitration in June 2024.
Carter says that the arbitration process, which is a way of resolving a private dispute with the help of a third party, was stacked against him from the beginning.
The arbitration process is expensive, and the contract Carter signed with Adobe back in 2018 had a clause stating Adobe would cover the cost of arbitration on behalf of Carter if he couldn’t afford it, which he couldn’t. But Adobe allegedly refused to honor the terms of the agreement and instead offered to pay the arbitrators’ fees to review Adobe’s motion to dismiss all claims against it. The arbitrator agreed to the arrangement.
Adobe then moved for a summary judgment on the case, which was fully granted except for one of Diversity Photos’ claims: negligence. The negligence claim stated that Adobe put Diversity Photos’ archive online without any watermarks or copyright management information. In doing so, other AI companies such as Midjourney, Stability AI, and Google were also able to train on the photo library without compensation. But even on that claim, Carter still didn’t win.
“Adobe’s strategy was to litigate every step. So, we had to file a second time to prove we cannot afford arbitration and that Adobe’s terms say they will pay if we cannot afford it,” Carter explains.
“But to have that reviewed by the arbitrator cost $24,000. Essentially, we must pay to show we cannot afford the costs. We had no choice but to withdraw. So even though we wanted to continue pursuing our last remaining claim, we couldn’t move forward because we could not afford the cost — this was economic exclusion from the legal process.”
Carter says Adobe weaponized the arbitration clauses in the original contract. “A small business that represents marginalized communities was effectively denied its day in court — or even its day in arbitration — because we couldn’t afford the toll booth,” he says.
Adobe allegedly made it clear that if the judge were to make the company pay for Carter’s legal fees, it would pay them at the end of the process — meaning Carter would have to pay the costs upfront.
Adobe has since moved to have the arbitration award confirmed in court as precedent for future cases. In November 2025, a “hostile” process server arrived at Carter’s home with a petition from Adobe to confirm the Contractual Arbitration Award.
“We believe the arbitration process was fundamentally flawed,” Carter says. “The arbitrator refused to address the cost issue that was contractually required before ruling on Adobe’s motion to dismiss everything.”
“He treated Adobe’s unsubstantiated assertions as established facts without any discovery. No documents were ever exchanged between the parties.”
Carter frets that his experience will impact other creators since the judge in his ruling said, “AI outputs cannot be proven to be the underlying copyrighted works.”
“This has nothing to do with any of our claims so he ruled on something that doesn’t pertain to our case but will be used and referenced against creators for decades,” Carter adds. “We’re asking the court to vacate the award on multiple grounds under California’s arbitration statute.”
Back when Carter signed his agreement with Adobe in 2018, generative AI products didn’t exist.
“The contract I signed gave Adobe a license to use my images for ‘developing new features and services [to promote my work],’ Carter says.
But while he assumed that wording was there for Adobe to improve its platform, the company assumed otherwise.
“Adobe’s argument? The word ‘new’ means they can do anything new. Anything. Including something that didn’t exist when I signed the contract. Including AI training. Including building a tool that directly competes with the very content I licensed to them,” Carter says.
Carter says his story is a warning to other creators signing “standard, non-negotiable, click-through contracts.” The word new, he says, becomes a blank check.
“That’s why we’re fighting to have this ruling vacated,” he adds. “Not just for Diversity Photos, but because if this interpretation stands, it sets a precedent that guts creator rights across the board. No contract from the pre-AI era should be interpreted as a blank check for AI training. The creators who signed those agreements never could have imagined this use, and the platforms know it.”
Ultimately, AI has impacted Carter’s business. He calls the rise of generative AI an industry-wide crisis for content creators in niche markets.
“The irony is that our content is valuable precisely because it’s hard to create — real people, real diversity, real consent,” he says.
“Generative AI threatens to commoditize all of that. And the companies building these AI models are profiting from our work without compensating us.”
PetaPixel reached out to Adobe for comment but did not hear back as of publication.
Sigma has been developing a full-frame Foveon sensor since 2018 but there have not been major advancements in that process since 2022. However, CEO Kazuto Yamaki says that Sigma engineers have made progress and it should be ready to proceed to the final stage of development this year.
Foveon sensor technology uses a proprietary three-layer structure in which red, green, and blue pixels each have their own full layer. In traditional sensors, the three pixels share a single layer in a mosaic arrangement and the camera “fills in” missing colors by examining neighboring pixels.
Since each pixel of a photo is recorded in three colors, the resulting photo should be sharper with better color accuracy and fewer artifacts. Foveon sensors have made it into production cameras in the past, but always smaller than full-frame. Sigma has been trying to realize the dream of the larger, full-frame Foveon sensor for nearly a decade.
Back in 2022, Yamaki explained that the development process of the full-frame sensor could be broken into three stages:
Stage 1: Repeated design simulations of the new three-layer structure to confirm that it will function as intended.
Stage 2: Prototype evaluation using a small image sensor with the same pixel size as the product specifications but with a reduced total pixel count to verify the performance characteristics of the image sensor in practice.
Stage 3: Final prototype evaluation using a full-frame image sensor with the same specifications as the mass products including the AD converter etc.
At the time, Yamaki said that the senor’s development had entered Stage 2 and by the summer of 2022, he believed that the sensor would be ready by the end of that year. This, after Sigma was forced to pull the sensor “back to the drawing board” a year previously due to what he described as the discovery of a critical flaw.
Unfortunately, that timeline slipped. Two years later, Yamaki admitted that the sensor’s development had not progressed beyond Stage 2. Last spring, Yamaki said that the sensor had been continuously delayed due to the discovery of technical issues with each new prototype.
“Unfortunately, it’s been taking more time, much more time than we expected, and it’s delayed, delayed, delayed. Because every time we make a prototype, we find some technical issues, but we are making progress little by little because we already promised to deliver the products with the Foveon sensor,” Yamaki said in an interview with Chris Niccolls on The PetaPixel Podcast.
Earlier this month at the CP+ Show in Yokohama, Japan, Yamaki provided another update that, for the first time since 2022, sounds promising: progress has been made.
“We made some progress since last year and we have been narrowing down the cause of the problems — the technical problems. And probably this spring to summer timeframe, we will be able to go to the next stage, but still it’s in the middle of the sensor development,” Yamaki tells PetaPixel, indicating that the sensor development remains in Stage 2.
That said, his team has been making progress on the biggest technical problem: noise.
“The main problem — there are actually several problems — is mainly noise. And we needed to find the cause of the noise. There were several causes of problems and we’ve been solving them.”
Hearing that noise is the biggest technical issue Sigma is facing does make sense. On paper, Foveon sensors should collect about three times more light, which should translate in a 1.7 times improvement in signal to noise ratio, Timothee Cognard explained in a story back in 2022. However, it turns out that in practical comparisons, the low-light performance of Foveon sensors falls short.
“One of the limitations of Foveon’s approach is that image noise is higher than in conventional sensors,” Foveon General Manager Shri Ramaswami admitted in a 2014 interview.
“This is probably due in part to inefficiencies within the sensor architecture itself — perhaps some light is lost to internal structures that separate the layers — and also in part to the processing that has to be done to produce pure colors from the rather mixed signals that the chip actually captures.”
In short, it is really complicated to get light to move well through the various layers of the sensor at each photodiode site. But there are also software challenges, compounding possible problems. It is speculation, but noise issues could have been exacerbated when Sigma changed the pixel size of this full-frame sensor, leading to issues that have taken four years to address.
But there has been progress, and Yamaki sounded hopeful that development could finally leave Stage 2 this year. Regardless, to take on this challenge for what will ultimately be niche, low-volume production is admirable.
YoloLiv, best known for its streamer-friendly Micro Four Thirds cameras like the YoloCam S7, has announced a brand-new Micro Four Thirds lens, the YoloLiv Lens. It is an 18mm f/1.4 prime lens for Micro Four Thirds cameras, promising high image quality and swift, smooth autofocus for video.
YoloLiv, officially Hangzhou Zingxi Technology Co., Ltd, joined the Micro Four Thirds System back in October 2023, promising to subsequently introduce compliant products to the market.
The company’s first Micro Four Thirds product, the YoloCam S7, is an interchangeable lens Micro Four Thirds camera designed primarily for streaming and content creation. It features a vertical-oriented design, a 10.7-megapixel Sony IMX Micro Four Thirds sensor, and 4Kp60 video recording.
While some of the marketing materials surrounding the YoloCam S7 were strange and numerous online reviews were sponsored content, it is nonetheless a rather interesting camera with a distinct, video-friendly design. At launch, YoloLiv recommended the Panasonic 15mm f/1.7 or 25mm f/1.7 primes for use with the YoloCam S7.
Now, YoloLiv has its own lens to recommend for use with its streaming camera. As mentioned, the new YoloLiv Lens is an 18mm f/1.4 prime, although it is officially just called the YoloLiv Lens. This is a focal length and aperture combination, which is always nice to see in a Micro Four Thirds format that can occasionally feel a bit stagnant.
The YoloLiv Lens also aims to separate itself through its aggressive pricing. The lens is $299, compared to the $598 asking price of the Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 15mm f/1.7 ASPH. lens.
The YoloLiv Lens has a seven-element, seven-group optical design, nano multi-layer coating, and a seven-bladed aperture. The company notes that it has a stepper-motor autofocusing system, promising smooth, accurate focus. It has four aspherical lens elements and three low-dispersion elements.
The YoloLiv Lens is an especially interesting product because the company built it from the ground up, directly in response to customer requests. YoloCam S7 customers noted that finding the perfect lens for their camera could be challenging, and the options were typically quite pricey.
“This launch marks a major milestone for us. It’s not just a new product — it’s the realization of a complete, professional ecosystem, shaped by user feedback at every stage,” YoloLiv says.
A hallmark of the Micro Four Thirds system is its compatibility among its products. For example, using an OM System lens on a Panasonic camera is as easy as just attaching it. While certain features do not always work in every possible instance, there is still basic compatibility across the board. However, YoloLiv says that the lens is currently compatible only with the YoloCam S7 camera, although it is unclear if YoloLiv means it only works with the S7 in YoloLiv’s own lineup, or if there really is an issue with compatibility on all other Micro Four Thirds cameras.
The YoloLiv Lens will be available in late March or early April on the YoloLiv store, Amazon, and other retailers. The lens will be available for $299 in the United States and €259 in Europe.
The full-frame anamorphic lens segment continues to grow at an impressive clip. Blazar, which just announced the Talon series of full-frame 1.5x autofocus-equipped lenses less than two months ago, has unveiled yet another new series of anamorphic lenses: the Viper.
The Blazar Viper series lenses feature a unified, fast T2.1 aperture, 1.5x anamorphic squeeze, and cover full-frame image sensors. Unlike the recent Talon lenses, the Vipers are manual focus, as is typical for anamorphic cinema lenses. As CineD reports, Blazar is positioning the new Viper lenses as a “more modern, lighter alternative” to Blazar’s Remus series.
While the Viper lenses may be designed as an alternative to the Remus primes, there are actually interesting similarities between the Viper and Talon lenses. Blazar has used the same optical designs in both new series, which makes a lot of sense. By removing autofocus, Blazar has been able to shrink the lenses a bit. There are three focal lengths in this initial release: 35mm, 50mm, and 75mm, and all three of them weigh less than 633 grams (22.3 ounces). As Blazar says, this makes the Viper lenses a compelling choice for shooting handheld or on gimbals.
Although Blazar has not yet shared full specifications for its new Viper anamorphic lenses, the company has made some promises regarding image quality. Blazar says that compared to the older Remus anamorphics, the new Viper lenses are sharper, delivering a cleaner overall look. As for whether that’s good or bad depends on the user, but Blazar has engineered its latest cinema primes to be optically superior.
The new Viper lenses are slightly longer and lighter than the Remus primes, and they feature a longer 200-degree focus throw, versus the 150-degree throw of the Remus series lenses. The company has also reduced the minimum focusing distance across the board. In the case of the 35mm T2.1, for example, the Viper focuses as close as 0.37 meters (1.2 feet), down from 0.68 meters (2.2 feet) on the Remus. That’s a significant improvement.
In many other ways, the lenses are similar. They all feature unified front diameters, cinema-ready designs with 0.8 MOD gearing, and the trademark oval bokeh and flare of anamorphic lenses.
The Blazar Viper 1.5x Anamorphic lenses will be available in PL/EF mount and are expected to launch soon. Blazar has not yet shared precise availability or pricing information, but as a reference, the Remus lenses are around $1,000 each, and Blazar historically launches its lenses in discounted bundles. While the Blazar Viper lenses are not yet available to preorder, once they are, they will be available at B&H.
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