Lightroom

In his latest photography tutorial, noted French photographer and prolific video tutorial maker Serge Ramelli discusses his top five Lightroom tips.  

I love Lightroom. It is an amazing tool that is able to do almost everything that I need when I edit, and do so in an organized way. The one problem that we’ve all had with it though is the lagging speed that can be infuriating. This past year, I spent a considerable amount of time with one goal: to do anything I could to speed up my editing process.

If you work in certain genres of photography or shoot with a certain style, you might often come home with thousands of images and a small organizational nightmare awaiting you in Lightroom. This helpful tutorial will show you show to quickly and automatically wrangle those huge sets of images into something much more organized and manageable. 

Earlier this year I reviewed ACDSee Ultimate 10. However, ACDSee just released the 2018 version of their flagship photo editing software and thus it’s time for an update. The brand new iteration promises to offer a more efficient workflow, layered editing for advanced retouching, vastly improved performances, and new tools for photographers to edit their pictures better than ever.

Importing photos after a shoot is often one of the more boring parts of an assignment and getting it done as quickly and easily as possible is often the name of the game. This has unfortunately led to a lot of Lightroom users not really using the Import function to its full potential.

The Nikon D850 is all over every photography blog and for good reason.

Without a doubt, Lightroom is an extremely powerful editor. So much in fact, that I can edit an entire wedding without ever leaving the program. The main things I find myself doing that cause me to leave Lightroom and enter Photoshop are multiple exposures, liquefying, more advanced cloning and healing, and adding certain overlays.

Giving your portraits a cold, dramatic finish is a neat way to give them an alternate look that makes them stand out a bit. This helpful tutorial will show you how to take a standard portrait and transform it, and it does it using only Lightroom. 

There is such a variety of plugins these days it is hard to know which ones are the most useful. Each user will find ones that work better for their own needs, however, these few choices here are perfect for everyone using Lightroom at any capacity. 

Lightroom is a nuanced application full of controls, sections, subcontrols, subsections, sub-sub- well, you get my point. One of the least often examined tabs is buried at the bottom of the Develop Module: the Camera Calibration tab. This video gives a helpful explanation of exactly what that tab controls. 

I find it interesting how often I see new photographers make the exact same editing mistakes I made when I started out. Every photographer who has at least a few years of experience can look back at some of their first sessions and find a number of things that they continually did wrong.

When Picktorial 3 was released, it promised a solid support of Fuji RAF files. Today, it’s getting even better by offering film simulation color profiles. The profiles are available as an add-on specifically designed for Picktorial 3 and Fujifilm X-Trans sensor cameras.

There seems to be a surprising amount of contention relating to whether or not you should watermark your images. Some people are adamant that yes, you absolutely need to put your stamp, so to speak, on images that you're putting out there online. Other people feel that a watermark is tacky, or that somehow it's presence cheapens the quality of the image that it has been applied to.

When it comes to processing your digital images, there are so many tools available to you and sometimes the process can seem a bit convoluted. Personally, I like to use a mix of both Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop to make the most out of my images.

Lightroom is widely used for cataloging and editing photos. But did you know that you can use it to quickly and easily edit video as well? Colin Smith of PhotoshopCafe offers five quick tips on color grading and editing videos in Lightroom. 

Traditionally, more involved edits such as dodging and burning are done in Photoshop, but it's often desirable to stay in Lightroom if you can. This helpful tutorial shows you how to dodge and burn a portrait all in Lightroom. 

If you've got some old family photos lying around that you've scanned and cataloged in Lightroom, you might be interested in colorizing them. Here's how to do that without ever even touching Photoshop.  

Recently, Adobe sent out a survey to users inquiring about their most common performance gripes in relation to Lightroom's notoriously sluggish behavior, even on high spec computers. Today, Adobe has released a new update to Lightroom that is meant to address some of these performance concerns. We quickly installed it to see if any of Adobe's claims are true. 

I love editing photos. For me, pressing the shutter is only the first 10 percent of the adventure. So, any product that promises to not only speed up the editing process, but just as importantly, make it more intuitive, is an intriguing proposition. Enter Palette, which transforms editing from an exercise in mousing sliders to a real, tactile process. 

How could you make photo editing more intuitive? Both working professional photographers and beginners would really benefit from a more intuitive, time-saving way of interacting with Adobe Lightroom. Dragging sliders and rating images can be, well, a drag sometimes.

Adobe Lightroom can be a powerful tool in your photography workflow. There are a lot of features that are included, but as a new user or even someone who has been using it for a while, there might be some useful tricks within Lightroom of which you are still unaware. How many of these are new to you? 

Editing a picture is all about making the most out of what your sensor has captured to make your creative vision come to life. How you see a scene will differ from what others, or even your camera, see at the exact same time and place. Adjusting your file in post-production is thus critical to share with others what you saw with your eyes and mind.

Adobe took to its Lightroom Journal blog to ask users to submit feedback about Lightroom's "most pressing issues" when it comes to performance of the application.

Chromatic aberration is an extremely common lens problem that can leave your images with weirdly colored edges. In its more subtle incarnations, it can be easy to miss until you've already exported the image, but it turns out Lightroom has some helpful tools to help you see where it might be hiding.  

Color balance underwater is not always an easy task. In a fresh water spring, you have the ability to capture the red spectrum a bit more than in a pool, but still not nearly as much as on land. The approach to color correcting your underwater images is not as daunting as it may seem the moment you open them up on your computer and see just blue hues.

Lightroom's local adjustment sliders are a great way to do things like add a graduated filter to a landscape shot or draw attention to your subject with a subtle vignette. Sometimes though, you want to change the strength of your adjustment after the fact, which is where this great tip will help.  

The lo-fi, retro film look has regained a lot of traction in the last few years. There are two ways to get it: buy an old film camera on eBay or learn how to manipulate your digital images to achieve a similar look. Here's a great tutorial on the latter method.  

Outsourcing is quickly becoming a standard practice. More and more photographers are using outsourcing services full time, while others are using them during the busy part of their season. While outsourcing has become more common in the industry, there are still some questions as to it’s worth.

The photo came out of the camera like that, I swear! Not really, and now there’s a website that can prove it. 

Developer Piotr Chmolowski shared a new tool he’s created, Pixel Peeper, to reddit and other sites a couple of days ago, and it’s quite revealing – literally.

If you work in Lightroom quite a bit, I'm sure you've encountered a situation in which you wanted to compare two images or keep one open while working on another. Lightroom offers a few ways to do this, but using the Second Window function might be one of the more helpful ways to do it, particularly if you're working with multiple displays.  

If you're a fan of Lightroom presets, the PIC Presets Collection might be the most complete set you've ever seen. Check out our review of the full system and find out how if they offer the versatility you're looking for. 

You might say they are late to the pack, and it's quite ironic. One of the largest photography communities in the world and Adobe Lightroom, the software many photographers use to make the photos look the way they do. I'm glad they are doing it, but why now? I mean, Fstoppers has over 325,000 followers on Instagram.

With the importance that social networks now take, our work as photographers has evolved into something entirely different over the past few years. Nowadays, images must be edited faster than ever, and, sometimes, that means not being able to use our computers, but having to rely on mobile solutions.

Effectively converting a color image to black and white involves much more than a simple “convert to grayscale” type of operation. In this video, Aaron Nace of Phlearn demonstrates how to produce a stunning black and white version of any color image in Lightroom. 

Capture One offers quite a few tools to adjust your raw files. It’s best known for its color editing capabilities, but luminosity adjustments are also very well designed. One of them was introduced last year with Capture One Pro 9, and it’s called the Luma Curve. It’s a powerful feature to adjust contrast manually while avoiding any color shift.

Working with a second shooter has a ton of advantages: you can cover more moments, you get different angles and perspective on the same moments, and they even allow you to try new things during the day that you normally couldn't afford to do.

Black and white images are the little black dresses of the photo world: they're always in style. Creating one is about more than just clicking a single button, though. This helpful tutorial will show you how to take complete control and make your black and white conversions in Lightroom as best as possible. 

A little over a week ago, Phase One introduced Capture One Pro 10.1. The new release of the professional imaging software comes with a couple of exciting new features making life easier for many photographers, especially those using Fuji cameras. In this 45-minute long webinar, David Grover goes over most new aspects of the app and shows how to take advantage of them. 

White balancing shots is not always as easy of a task as it seems. Sometimes, a gray card cannot be used, other times the lighting is too poor and the colors don’t come out perfectly. However, Blake Rudis from f64 Academy has found an extremely efficient and quick solution to color correct any shots in three easy steps. 

I'm personally obsessed with the cinematic look in my stills work. I think it's timeless, elegant, and endlessly interesting. If you'd like to add that same style to your own portraiture, this tutorial will show you how to do it using just Lightroom. 

Outsourcing for me has always been one of those things I just never thought to be possible. How could someone who doesn't know what I’m thinking know how I want an image to look? Sometimes I don't even know what I want an image to look like and some of my favorite images have come from playing around while editing.

So, you decided to kick iPhoto to the curb and step up to Lightroom, but you need a little help getting started. This great tutorial will show you the ins and outs of the application and get you up and running in no time. 

Lightroom is full of little hidden features and settings, but perhaps the least addressed setting of all is the Camera Calibration tab. Hidden at the very bottom of the Develop module, here's what that tab controls. 

Presets are awesome. They've sped up my workflow by an order of magnitude since I first started using them back when I switched to Lightroom years ago. They save time and, therefore, money! But, to quote every action movie ever made: "Is that all you got?"

After releasing a tutorial video together, Phase One and Pratik Naik are teaming up again but for a 60-minute webinar this time. It’s your chance to see and learn all the color tricks the beauty and fashion retoucher uses to get incredible results with any image using Capture One Pro. 

Alien Skin Exposure has long been known as a plugin for Photoshop and Lightroom. But since Exposure X was released, it’s trying to compete with the big names in the raw processing department. The software has grown into a standalone app and isn’t just a plugin anymore. Today, Alien Skin is announcing an update for Exposure X2, making it more powerful than ever. 

Look Up Tables (LUTs) are generally used to changes certain colors and their ranges in video using Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro or any professional video editing software. We often edit our photos with actions and presets in Lightroom or Photoshop, but it is possible to edit these photos using LUTs too. This video by Peter McKinnon shows how to do just that.

Mastin Labs out of Seattle is the creator of some of my favorite film emulation presets for Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. Today they're releasing their latest preset pack, Portra Pushed. Check it out my review of the pack after the jump. 

Lightroom has some quick and powerful tools for color correcting your images. This great tutorial walks you through all of them, whether you prefer one-click adjustments or full manual control. 

One of the most common Lightroom complaints is that it runs too slowly. However, there are steps you can take to improve your experience. This great video outlines seven such tricks.