Lightroom

Adobe Lightroom is where most photographers spend a significant portion of their working lives — and knowing it well makes a real difference to both the quality of your output and the speed of your workflow. This section covers Lightroom from practical angles: import and organization, raw processing, masking and local adjustments, color grading, and the workflow habits that separate efficient photographers from those drowning in a backlog.

The Simple Secret of Creating Dramatic Landscape Photos

The difference between a mediocre edit and a superb edit is sometimes subtle. This subtle difference can often be just a matter of applying a minor dodge and burn, vignette, or other editing technique that gently finesses the image into a masterpiece. 

DxO PhotoLab 3.1: A Lightroom Replacement?

Photolab 3.1 from DXO has been out a couple of months now, and early looks from photographers have been positive. It's a complete raw editor and has many features photographers will expect to see and adds some very worthwhile enhancements that will highly interest editors at every skill level. 

How to Edit Landscape Images for a Painterly Feel in Lightroom

Some landscape photographers produce images that have a distinctly classical, painterly tone to them. The starting point is always a good image, but in order to tease out this particular ambience, a few simple yet strategic edits in Lightroom are all one needs. 

Five Ways Lightroom Is Just Better

Following up from last’s week’s article about Capture One, today, we’ll take a look at its main rival in the raw processing field, Lightroom. To keep things on a relatively level playing field, I’ll be discussing what is now called “Lightroom Classic,” the desktop version of Lightroom. 

What's Wrong With Buying Lightroom Presets?

Presets are a contentious topic in the world of photography, especially when it seems that every photographer on YouTube has a pack of film emulations to flog. That said, they do have their place, and the people at Mango Street run you through what to consider when buying and how to put them to good use. 

Two Quick and Useful Tips for Using the Radial Filter in Lightroom

Lightroom is full of both global and local adjustment tools for your images, and you might be surprised by just how far you can push an edit without having to jump into Photoshop. This quick and helpful video will show you two great tricks for getting more out of the Radial Filter tool in Lightroom.  

The Usefulness of the Painter Tool in Lightroom

The Painter tool is extremely easy to overlook in Lightroom, and yet, it is a highly efficient way to add data to your photos and keep them better organized. This great video will show you the tool, how it works, and why it is so useful. 

On-The-Go Digital Storage Tips for Photographers

If you've been having trouble keeping your photos in an organized yet future-proof way, then check out my thoughts on the issue here.  Now that every digital device is getting more and more portable, photographers are also becoming more efficient and flexible in terms of working conditions.

7 Tone Curve Tips That Will Make Your Editing Better

The tone curve in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) is a powerful tool. Subtle changes to the tone curve can make a big difference in the look and feel of your image. Here are a few tips and tricks that will make your tone curve adjustments easier and more precise. 

Why Capture One Is Better for Professionals

We all know that Lightroom has its ever-growing list of issues. Yet for IT-illiterate folk like myself, the change can be daunting. However, my move to C1 is perhaps the best thing I have done in 2019. 

If Everyone Hates Adobe, Why Is It Pulling in Record Profits?

Last week, Adobe reported that the fourth quarter of 2019 was the most lucrative in the company’s history, delivering annual revenues of $11 billion. Given that it’s rare to hear a good word said about Adobe in the world of photography and videography, why is the company still so incredibly successful? 

Five Techniques to Add Drama to Your Photos Using Lightroom

Post-processing is your chance to really add your personal signature to a photo, and one of the most common styles photographers like to embrace is adding drama to their images. This excellent video tutorial will show you five ways to add more drama to your photos using Lightroom. 

How I Edited It: Five Easy Steps for Portrait Retouching in Lightroom

Lightroom's Adjustment Brush and Spot Removal Tool have improved in leaps and bounds over the past few updates, opening the door to quicker, easier portrait retouching for photographers of all editing skill levels. Here are five steps to quick and easy portrait retouching in Lightroom. 

Step 1: Presets and Basic Adjustments

Learn How to Post Process a Desert Landscape

As we enter the winter photography season for the northern hemisphere it’s the best time to get out to the desert or arid areas to shoot landscapes. Cooler day time temperatures and some interesting areas in the national parks make for a great trip especially in places like Death Valley with its ubiquitous sand dunes, but how do you edit those images to really make them stand out? 

The Usefulness of Lightroom's Secondary Display

Buried deep inside Lightroom's menu is a highly useful feature: the secondary display function. This can make your workflow both far easier and much more efficient. This great video dives into the secondary display feature to show you how it can be of use to your post-processing workflow. 

10 Common Questions on Switching to Capture One From Lightroom and Capture One Black Friday Sale!

If you're looking for a raw processor that does more and are not currently using Capture One, it's likely that in your quest for a solution, Capture One has crossed your mind. Making the switch to Capture One from Lightroom, for example, is easier and quicker than you think, and right now, with Capture One's Black Friday sale, it's the perfect time to buy. 

Capture One Offers Unique and Powerful Benefits For Portrait Photography

The landscape of the portrait photographer has certainly been in flux over the last decade, in which time we’ve seen photos of people go from unreal alabaster-like skin to something much more real, color grading become prominent, and image resolution grow, even though the consumption of images has moved largely to smaller screens. 

How to Get Better Skin Tones in Lightroom

One of the most subtle but crucial aspects of any portrait is the skin tones. And while you can spend lots of time in Photoshop tweaking them to be just right, sometimes, you do not want to invest that much effort into an image. This excellent tutorial will show you how to get better skin tones using only Lightroom. 

How to Use Virtual Copies and Snapshots in Lightroom

Virtual Copies and Snapshots are powerful features in Lightroom that often go unused or underutilized. In this article, we'll cover what they are and how they can be used to make your editing workflow faster and easier. 

Shining Light on the Lightroom Histogram

Most of the adjustment sliders in Adobe Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw are self-explanatory, for example, highlights and shadows. But do you truly understand what is happening when you move that slider? 

13 Tips for an Improved Lightroom Experience

Lightroom is probably the most used photo database program available, with an integrated raw file editor, and many options for post processing. These thirteen tips can improve your Lightroom experience.

You Might Want to Check Your Lightroom Settings More Often

The Lens Corrections panels in the Lightroom Develop Module and Adobe Camera Raw provides the ability to correct lens problems such as distortion, chromatic aberration, and vignetting. These settings are often turned on and never given a second thought. 

The Secrets of Hidden Lightroom Keywords

Many photographers live and breathe by keywording their photos in Lightroom. Keywords can be used both for describing images, as well as combined with other features of Lightroom for organizing, searching, publishing, and exporting photos. 

Get More out of Your Tablet When Editing in Photoshop or Lightroom

Are you using a tablet for your Photoshop and Lightroom editing? Yes? But are you getting the most out of your Wacom tablet? Probably not if you are like most photographers. You probably set it up on the first day and haven’t gone back to activate all those remaining features. 

How to Use Lightroom's Texture Tool

Lightroom recently added the Texture tool to the Develop module, and it brings with it new capabilities to the program. If you have not had much time to play around with the slider yet, this great video will show you everything you need to know about how to use the slider and where it can be helpful on your own images. 

Are You Making These Lightroom and Photoshop Mistakes?

If you're like me and primarily use Lightroom Classic for your photo editing, you probably occasionally edit a photo in Photoshop. If you do, you might be making the same Photoshop file mistakes I made. 

The typical workflow, in this case, is that you right-click on a photo in Lightroom, select "Edit In," and then choose one of the following from the context menu:

How to Create Perfect Panoramas With Tilt-Shift lenses

Creating panoramic photographs is nothing new; most of us have either had a crack with a camera or maybe even with a phone app/camera. A lot of my work involves creating panoramic/stitched-together photographs with a tilt-shift lens, which in my opinion is the best way to do so.  

Three Helpful Lightroom Tips for Any Photographer

Lightroom is a complex and intricate application, and it can be easy to overlook features in the program that can make your life far easier and efficient or even open up new capabilities. This helpful video features three tips that anyone using Lightroom should definitely know about. 

How I Edited One of My Favorite Wildlife Images in Lightroom

For many, wildlife photography is all about natural colors and objective realism. The light, composition, and behavior captured should do all the talking. And for the most part, I agree — for that other tiny little bit, though, I beg to differ. Please allow me to elaborate in more ways than one. 

How I Edit My Food Photographs

Each niche in photography has its own requirements when it comes to post-production. In this video, I go over my process for editing images in Adobe Lightroom. 

How Much RAM Do You Need for Lightroom?

Photographers can almost always use more RAM, particularly when they start working with larger and more complex files. How much do you really need for Lightroom, however?

Using Lightroom Classic's Secondary Display to Be More Productive

Whether I'm teaching someone Lightroom or only showing a friend my photos in Lightroom for the first time, the one thing they usually comment about right away is my use of Lightroom's Secondary Display feature. It's a great feature that really makes me more productive. 

One of the Most Useful but Rarely Used Features of Lightroom

Lightroom is an intricate program full of numerous features — sometimes so many that it can be easy to miss out on a particularly useful tool that can make your editing life both easier and more efficient. This excellent video will show you one of those tools. 

How a Photoshop Noob Composited This Series of Action Photos

Having completed what proved to be one of the most challenging shoots of my career, I was then faced with the task of editing and compositing the images. Due to my inexperience, getting the results that I wanted using Photoshop proved to be a steep learning curve. Here’s how I went about it. 

How I Shot It: Five Steps for a Foolproof Airbnb Shoot

In the share economy, more and more people are finding their side hustle in the form of renting out extra rooms or vacation homes through services like VRBO and Airbnb. Earlier this month, I did a quick and easy property shoot for one such hopeful side hustler.

The Power of the Dehaze Tool

The Dehaze tool in Adobe Camera Raw and Adobe Lightroom is fantastic for landscape photography. Here are some examples of its use. 

Use Color to Dictate Your Style in Landscape Photography

Ansel Adams loved editing his images in the darkroom and often spoke about it. More importantly, he saw it as an important role in creating the final image that he had visualized when he took the shot.   

Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships. -Ansel Adams

My Tether Trolley Set Up

If you are an avid instagram user, you have probably noticed that almost all professionals tether their cameras with bright orange cables to a computer, there is a lot of kit involved in this and finding all the parts can be tricky when you don't know what you are looking for.

Lightroom Import and Export Tips and Tricks

Lightroom is undoubtedly a great tool for Digital Asset Management (DAM). Some people use it for Digital Asset Management and Editing while others use it just for Digital Asset Management and do all of their editing in Photoshop or some other external application. 

How I Edit Monochrome Portraits

In this quick guide, I'm going to demonstrate how I edited a particular set of portraits for a magazine. Taken as part of the Face of London Runway 2019 contest, these black and white images were shot in studio and processed with a combination of Lightroom and Photoshop.