Lightroom

Being connected to your devices may not always be practical for editing, especially when traveling. Smart previews can help you edit on the go but also free up your storage as well. With the WPPI conference fast approaching this is the best time to create your previews and let your external hard drives stay put at the house. 

Half of creating a landscape image is in the editing process. This is where you shape the photo to match your personal style and to make whatever statement or evoke whatever feeling you'd like it to. This helpful video will show you how to add depth and drama to a landscape shot using Lightroom.

For months, I’ve been looking for presets that would work in most apps I use to edit my videos and photos but couldn’t find one. That was until I discovered Lutify.me and its LUTs made compatible with Capture One and Lightroom.

We already had good reviews of a pre-release version of Lightroom Classic version 7.2 earlier this month, but today, it's finally out. As other software companies such as Apple have announced a slowdown of software feature developments and a concentration on bug fixes and performance improvements, so, too, has Adobe promised a renewed focus on Lightroom performance across all platforms. And this is just the beginning.

One of the things that I thoroughly enjoy about photography is the range of possibilities for style. Style is such a personal thing to each of us. We all have our own very different tastes in style, we all come from different backgrounds, and we all have different opportunities for learning and evolving our own styles. Just think about it, even if we were to all use the exact same sets of presets and programs to process all our images, the end results would still be different because of what we put into the shot while actually on the shoot.

LRTimelapse is without a doubt the best piece of software to manage extreme day-to-night and night-to-day transition when capturing a time-lapse sequence. This flicker remover program changed the industry for good and a new version with many improvements has just been announced. Here is what you need to know about it.

Lightroom tips are a lot like puppies: you can never have too many of them. And while I can't offer you a puppy (likely because I'm keeping them for myself), I can offer you this great video that will give you 25 helpful Lightroom tips in just 2 minutes.

For any of you out there who are like me and move between PC and Mac for your workflow, or those who are considering migrating your workflow completely from the Windows world to the Mac environment, here is a simple step-by-step guide for moving over your most important asset.

Sometimes, you'll come home with an image that seems rather unremarkable, but when you play with it for a bit in Lightroom, it suddenly becomes something you hadn't envisioned when you first shot it. This great video will show you how to split toning saved an image.

Adobe Lightroom and Camera Raw house some solid color and toning options. These can be applied in a non-destructive way, and in general will get the job done, our photos finished and out into the world. However, for many others, Photoshop with its plethora of adjustment layers is hard to best when heavy color work is applied.

At the core of any image editor is the brush tool, and although many of us don't give it a second thought, it really is one of the most important features to master. Density, opacity, hardness, and flow all affect how the brush works in very different ways. Make sure you know the difference between these settings so you can work smarter when editing your images.

The chaotic nature in which photographers send their final galleries to a client is something I've often noticed. Galleries will jump around between scenes and cameras without any flow or organization. I am a wedding photographer, and maybe this means more to me than it would to other genres of photography. However, taking a few minutes to put everything in an order that flows well for your clients can create a tremendous difference in how your brand is perceived and in how you tell the story of their photoshoot.

Time is valuable. The next three minutes of this video could possibly save you a ton of time over the course of your editing career, and if there is absolutely anything I can do to speed up my Lightroom workflow, I’m all for it.

Have you ever taken a photo you knew had great potential from the moment you saw it on the back of your camera, come home to edit it, then spent an hour in Lightroom, only to look at the result and feel strangely let down? This great video examines why Lightroom edits sometimes go awry. 

When you're first starting out post-processing work in both Lightroom and Photoshop, any sort of editing can feel like it takes a long time, just because there are so many ways of going about things and it can take a little while to get your bearings. This great video will show you seven quick and straightforward fixes for photos using Lightroom.

I've been a Lightroom user since the beginning of my career and honestly, I love it. It fits seamlessly into my workflow, and I couldn't imagine using any other raw processor. That is of course until I downloaded a trial of Capture One 11. I've heard people talk about Capture One, but I never thought much of it. After all, what's wrong with Lightroom?

In addition to being the place where you perform a lot of edits on your photos, Lightroom is an excellent program for cataloging and organizing images. As you work over time, you're likely to have tens of thousands of images stored there, and it becomes crucial to carefully organize your photos so you can easily find and work with them. This great video will show you just how to do that along with some other helpful tips.

Sharpening photos taken at higher ISOs is a tricky thing, as you run the risk of making the appearance of noise much worse very quickly. This helpful video will show you how to sharpen high-ISO photos to enhance detail while still reducing noise.

One of the most common complaints among Adobe Lightroom’s users is the issue of it restricting your catalog access to a single computer. Photographers who travel often or studios with multiple editors have continually looked for options that would allow them to sync their edits across several computers conveniently. If you search the web, you can find a few workarounds for this problem, but none that are as simple most photographers would like. However, the creation of the new Lightroom CC has opened up several new possibilities, including a simple option to easily edit your images from multiple computers.

Lightroom is likely where you spend a lot of (if not the majority) of your time working on images, so any tips that increase your efficiency or control over your images can add up to big time and quality gains over the long run. This helpful video contains 10 lesser known Lightroom tips and features that should be of use to most any photographer.

Good news for Windows users: after an eight-year wait, darktable, the free Lightroom alternative for editing raw photos, is now available.

Greg Benz, creator of the luminosity masking Photoshop script panel Lumenzia, is one of those experienced photographers who doesn't hesitate to share their technical knowledge with followers. In his latest video, he explains file formats in detail, both for Photoshop and Lightroom.

Adobe announced yesterday their 6.14 update for Lightroom is now available. The new update addresses bugs that were introduced in the previous release as well as additional camera raw support and profiles. Good news, right? Well, this will also be the last update released for perpetual customers.

People often think of Lightroom as the place where cataloging and basic editing takes place with Photoshop doing the heavy lifting. And while it's true that Photoshop is the more powerful editor, you can accomplish quite a bit using just Lightroom. This helpful video will show you five ways to edit more creatively using Lightroom.

Most people are a fan of the film look, but actually shooting, developing, and scanning it can be a bit more hassle and money than many of us are willing to undertake. The Rocket Rooster Analog Film Bundle gives you Lightroom presets for many popular film stocks as well as a range of local adjustment brushes for avoiding the need to go into Photoshop. Check out our review of the full system here.

Chances are that many of you are familiar with the works of Michael Shainblum. Not only was he Fstoppers' Photographer of the Month earlier this year in September, but he also garnered quite a bit of acclaim for his iconic shot of the solar eclipse in August this year. Aside from being an impressively accomplished landscape photographer, Shainblum is a skilled photography mentor. I've been a fan of his work for years now, and to this date, his tutorial covering post processing for star photography is one of the most enlightening courses I've ever purchased.

Let's be honest, managing our image files is arguably the least rewarding part of a photographer's job. There's very little satisfaction that comes with a well-organized catalog, and even less satisfaction when we can't find the files we need on a particular device. In the mobile age, having access to all your images and catalogs at any time on any device is critical. And, when you get a new computer, laptop, tablet or other device, getting access to your files can sometimes prove challenging, as I wrote about last week when I purchased a new MacBook Pro from B&H. 

If you've been out shooting recently, there's a good chance that you're now sitting down to edit a pile of photographs that capture the incredible colors that autumn brings. This brief tutorial shows you a quick and dirty trick (jump to three minutes to skip the waffle!) for getting Lightroom to make the most of those gorgeous, orangey tones.

One of the strongest ways to create a style or mood, and even consistency is to really nail your color. For years I struggled with color, and it can be a subjective thing but there are also some basic colors that look good together. The most popular I would say is that of the orange and teal. Orange and teal together complement each other and this is a great video to show you how to get there quickly in Lightroom.

Import and culling have always been two of the most time consuming and, frankly, annoying parts of Adobe Lightroom. Despite all of its improvements over the years, the process of getting files into Lightroom has remained a huge bottleneck in an otherwise swift workflow application. With Lightroom Classic CC, Adobe finally made a full attempt to address this by allowing us to use the embedded previews from our raw files as previews for culling within the app and improved the overall speed of adding files to the catalog. So, what’s changed, and just how useful are those changes?

Knowing how to visualize a shot in your head before you take it is an important step in the creative process, else you're simply firing off shots and hoping for a good edit to come out of the process. This great video follows a landscape photographer from pre-visualization all the way to printed photo.

I have heard several photographers complain about how slow Adobe Lightroom is. While I agree that Adobe needs to make some improvements to their photo processor and image organizer, there are a few things we can do on our machines to help Lightroom run a little more smoothly.  

Adobe Lightroom was a pretty slick piece of software to begin with, but over the past several updates it has become an incredibly powerful tool for photographers. Of all the different controls and tools available within the software, the Detail panel has become one of my favorites. If you use Adobe Camera Raw or Adobe Photoshop, you can find the same set of controls that we're talking about today which of course is within Lightroom. Adobe has been streamlining their systems for a long enough time now that handling raw files, although from a cataloging perspective is quite different, is almost identical between Lightroom, Camera Raw, and Photoshop.

Lightroom is likely where you spend a lot of, if not the majority of your post-processing time. And so, any little shortcuts or tricks you can pick up can add up to more efficiency and better output down the road. This helpful video will show you five such tricks to add to your arsenal. 

If there's any genre that requires the photographer to constantly be creatively resourceful, it's probably product photography. This helpful tutorial will show you how to create an interesting shot of a watch using common items you probably have around your house and some creative editing in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Adobe recently released the latest version of the desktop version of Lightroom, which is now dubbed "Lightroom Classic CC." Alongside it, they released Lightroom CC, an entirely new application that moves things to the cloud and seems to be targeted mostly toward advanced amateurs, but that also includes some interesting features along with the ability to integrate with the desktop version pros are used to. This helpful video will get you up and running on the new Lightroom CC.

You may have had the same reaction I did when I first started loading up the Develop module in Adobe's new Lightroom Classic CC update: oh no, why did Lightroom change all of my photos to an old process version!? First things first: don't worry. The process version did not change. Instead, Lightroom Classic CC introduces the fourth iteration of these so-called process versions, but this one (the first in half a decade) is different for a number of reasons.

Phase One has already released multiple Styles Pack since the beginning of the summer. Today, they announced their brand new Film Styles Pack and I had the chance to play around for a few days before it was officially announced. Rather than offering you a simple release article, I thought a review would be more useful. After four weddings and a couple of portrait sessions edited with it, here are my thoughts and why this might just be the perfect pack for VSCO lovers who rely on Capture One for their professional photo editing work.

Michael Shainblum, Fstoppers' Photographer of the Month for August, has been creating epic time-lapses for years now and he’s just released a new YouTube video tutorial. In this new video, Shainblum goes through his editing process detailing an Adobe-centric workflow for time-lapses.

Adobe just killed one of its last major one-time fee softwares, Lightroom, in favor of the subscription model introduced in 2013. While the most refractory users may continue to run on the previous versions, they will be forced to roll to the Creative Cloud at some point since Adobe will stop supporting the traditional software. Future raw images and video codecs will not work on old programs. But when looking at the price plan in detail, are we being milked by Adobe with the subscription model and if so, what are the alternatives?

Being that I’m primarily a wedding and documentary photographer, it’s not every day that I get the chance to take a portrait of a celebrity. Add to this that I live in Northwest Arkansas, which isn't really a hub for celebrities, makes it even less likely for me — especially one as well known as William H. Macy. So I thought it would be interesting to line out how I pulled it off and got the final image.

It's been at least four major updates to Lightroom throughout which so many photographers have been begging for performance improvements, even at the cost of feature updates. Finally, that day is here. Alongside today's announcement of Lightroom Classic CC (the new "normal Lightroom" for those who aren't yet aware of the name change), Adobe promised major performance updates. We know they're serious this time, but they've made similar performance enhancement claims in the past that have fallen far short of expectation. Do they mean it this time? Short answer: Hell yeah they do.

Adobe just announced some major photography-centric updates to its Creative Cloud programs. Alongside a new release of Lightroom Classic CC (the new name for what we all used to call "Lightroom"), Lightroom CC is a brand new application that works across all platforms: desktop, web, and mobile. The new software offers nearly all of the same editing features we're used to, but with an entirely new organizational structure reliant upon the cloud. While there's a standalone Lightroom CC plan, the current Photography Plan includes both the CC and Classic CC applications. So which should you use?

Adobe MAX is always a big time of the year for photographers, but this year's announcements and updates are the company's biggest since the introduction of Lightroom. Going forward, the now-old desktop-run Lightroom CC is called Lightroom Classic CC. But there's nothing classic about it when it comes to its performance improvements. This time, it's for real. Lightroom CC is now a completely new, 100-percent cloud-based product that works on any platform: desktop, mobile, and web. And Photoshop CC improvements help tie everything together no matter what you're using.

Half the trick to success with Lightroom is knowing how to move around the app efficiently. A lot of that comes down to the right combination of shortcuts and workflow, and this helpful video show you a quick way to organize relevant images and some key combinations to make the process quicker.

Photographers and digital artists alike have been using image editing software like Photoshop to enhance their work for years. There are several ways to add creative enhancements and filters to your work within Photoshop, but there are ways to add them without using the program or even in conjunction via other software and plugins. Auto FX Software has been around for more than 20 years with their customized creative photo software solutions which work as a stand-alone program or as a plugin for Photoshop or Lightroom. Right now you can get two of their modules for FREE along with support from Auto FX Software.

Do you know what keywords are and the best way to add them to your photos? What about what options to select when you are exporting your images? Have you ever heard of the painter tool? In this final part of my three-part series on Lightroom for beginners, I will cover the final steps to take after applying your final edits to your images.

Love them or hate them, Lightroom presets have become a staple in the world of editing. A lot of users use them to emulate their favorite photographers or in an effort to recreate certain film looks. The problem with these presets is that everyone that uses them ends up releasing work that looks the same as everyone else who has the same preset. This was apparent with the very popular VSCO presets. What DVLOP aims to do is give you the ability to not only emulate your favorite photographers, but also the tools to create your own style.

Manual lenses have a fraction of the weight, size, unsurpassed sharpness, and price in many instances over autofocus lenses. With all these benefits there would have to be some form of a con, and that is the issues that arise when adding metadata to your images.

A couple of weeks ago, I reviewed ACDSee's latest photo editing software release and even said it could replace Adobe products in many ways for Windows users. It was only wise to back that statement up with two complementary articles, this one being the first, showing to Adobe users how they could switch from Lightroom to ACDSee. In today’s write-up, I’ll concentrate on bringing files from previous Lightroom catalogs into ACDSee and also on how to manage your pictures in ACDSee Ultimate 2018.