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.

Another Useful Lightroom Feature You Probably Did Not Know Existed

I feel like I'm constantly hearing about new shortcuts in Lightroom that make my workflow increasingly painless. This is one that's been around for a while, but you have probably never used it. This short video is an easy to follow tutorial from photographer Matt Kosklowski about an exposure feature that will surely speed up your editing process. 

How To Enhance Eyes Using Lightroom

Everyone has heard the saying, "The eyes are the window to the soul." There is a lot of truth to this when it comes to photographs. The first thing many of us look at when we see an image are the eyes of the subject. In this article I'm going to teach you how to enhance eyes using the brush tool in Lightroom. 

The #Phlearnmethod Is Here To Make Photoshop Simple

The guys at Phlearn have done it again. This time they present us with a set of actions that will speed up your workflow and show you that Photoshop is nothing to be afraid of. The #phlearnmethod will allow you to transform your images in a few clicks, adding unique, themed-styles. 

Just Do It - How and Why I Shot the Best Photo of My Career

For years I found myself making excuses as to why I wasn't creating the type of images that I so desperately wanted to make. I didn't have the gear, I didn't have a model, I didn't have access to a studio. At the end of the day, it came down to one simple thing, I never tried. 

How To Achieve the Film Look Using Lightroom

It seems as if the film edit is getting more popular every day. A lot of beginner photographers out there will do anything to achieve this look. The easiest way to do that is to buy presets but I want to show you how to create the look yourself. I believe once you understand how to create the look yourself you can begin to find your own style.

Enhance Muscle Definition via Burning Directly from Lightroom

What's up everyone! My name is Pye and I am one of the educators for FStoppers Bahamas! This is my first article here on FStoppers, and I am really proud to be a part of such a great community of photographers. We all know dodging/burning is a fantastic tool when it comes to retouching.

Is Photoshop Dead? An Interview with Dave Doeppel

I’m a big proponent of outsourcing editing in my wedding photography business. There’s probably nothing more painful to me than the thought of trudging through 800-1000 images from each wedding I photograph.

Rethinking the JPEG

At the most basic level, photographers seem to be in two camps when it comes to image file types. There are those who care about the look of their images and shoot with big RAW files and those who don’t and use the smaller JPEG files.

VSCO Pack 6 Announced, Now Available

The guys at VSCO - Visual Supply Company - are at it again. Today they released Pack 6 of their wildly succesful Lightroom/ACR/Photoshop-based film emulation presets. They've dubed the set the alternative process collection, which includes films that have been pushed, pulled, and cross-processed stocks. Pack 6 includes the following presets*

Adobe Releases Plugin to Help Migrate from Aperture and iPhoto to Lightroom

Adobe has released a plugin it promised a while ago to migrate photo libraries from Apple's soon-to-be-forgotten Aperture and iPhoto apps into its own Lightroom. If you're worried about Apple's switch to its own all-in-one photo app, "Photos," or simply want to ensure similar functionality to that found in Aperture, Lightroom has long been an industry-standard alternative.

A Simple Lightroom Trick To Restore The Back Of Your Camera Look

Have you ever been shooting away with your camera, and you absolutely love the colors and saturation you see on the back of the screen...only to get your images home and have them look ENTIRELY different once you've loaded them into Lightroom?

Well for those of you who want your images to look like they did on your camera, i'm going to show you how to get that starting point back!

Top Lightroom Tip That Your Clients Will Thank You For Learning

If you are photographing people than you understand the importance of sharpening areas of your images while masking out other parts and keeping them soft. For example, I love to sharpen the eyes, the lips, the hair, but don't want to bring out any unnecessary detail on the cheeks.

Give Your Colors a Nice Kick With This Lightroom Trick

The great thing about the program Lightroom is that there are usually a number of different ways to accomplish a task. In this video I show you one fantastic way to create some nice colors in your photo by using a slider tool that you might not have even touched before.

Little Known Way to Manipulate Colors in Lightroom

For the last month I have shared a useful tip in Lightroom each week and I look forward to continuing the series. For this week I show you how to use the often overlooked color sliders to control the hue, saturation and luminance of each color in your photo. In the short video I also show how to get those mint saturated greens that are currently very popular.  

Are You Taking Advantage Of The Survey View in Lightroom?

Like Photoshop, Lightroom is a powerful piece of software. Sadly most of us learn the basics and don't take advantage of all that is has to offer. One powerful feature is called the "Survey View." Are you taking advantage of it? If not, take a couple minutes to watch this two minute video where I go over how to use the tool and the shortcut to get there.  

Another Useful Lightroom Tip Your Mom Never Taught You

Adobe Lightroom is a program full of many different little tips and tricks just waiting to be discovered. In this short video I show you one of my favorites which allows you to apply a selective focus technique to your photo without having to open it in Photoshop. This technique is especially useful if you want to draw your viewers attention somewhere specific in the photo. 

Quick Lightroom Tip - Import Multiple Cards at Same Time

As a wedding photographer I often fill up 3 or 4 memory cards at a wedding and it is important that I get those images downloaded and backed up as soon as possible. Rather than download one card at a time I like to do them all at the same time using multiple card readers.

Easily Upload Your Images to 500px via this Lightroom Plugin

500px has taken the world by storm since their launch in 2009. In many ways it's become the new hub for sharing and expoloring work from some of the greatest photographers around. This nifty little pluggin from the developers at 500px (available here) will alow you add one quick step to your workflow to share your images on the site.

 

Optimizing Photos for Maximum Quality and Minimum Size

What's the best way to optimize photos so that I can deliver quality to my clients while reducing the file size for faster uploads into the cloud? This has been a question I’ve been thinking about for sometime.

Adobe Develops Guide To Move From Aperture To Lightroom

Last month, Apple announced that they were ceasing development of the beloved Apple Aperture. While the software is still usable and available for purchase and download, it has a timeline on how long it will work, as new camera profiles will no longer be supported. Fortunately, Adobe has made the transition a little easier, with a simple transition guide. 

Take These Four Important Steps Before You Outsource Your Printing

Professional-quality photo printers and paper are expensive. It can be difficult to justify the steep price of the machine and upkeep for most photographers who shoot as a hobbyist or even a starting professional. Outsourcing your printing needs to a pro photo lab alleviates the cost, but there are some inherent complications in not being able to print from home.

Glyn Dewis Shows You How to Save an Almost Unusable Image

In this valuable tutorial Glyn Dewis takes a quick snapshot and shows you how to pull detail from highlights and shadows to make it a beautiful image. Dewis mentions some great workflow tips and tricks in Adobe Lightroom as well as how to bring your image over, non destructively, to Photoshop camera raw. 

 

[via Glyn Dewis - Youtube]

The Fastest and Easiest Way to Learn Adobe Lightroom

Back in 2004 I was given the Nikon D100 digital camera for Christmas and I started making money with the camera within a few months. I fell into wedding photography and within 2 years I was making almost 100% of my income shooting them. In the last 10 years I never learned how to process a RAW file (effectively) or use Lightroom until last week.  

Light Painting a Landscape in Lightroom

Watch this video where Glyn Dewis talks about his method to shoot landscapes, and his use of various techniques to develop the image in Lightroom with some fine tuning in Photoshop. 

 

Simple Tutorial to Understand Curves in Photoshop & Camera Raw

Curves are by far, the most powerful and versatile color and tone manipulator in Photoshop. Many photographers like Erik Almas & Brooke Shaden swear by it, and is a major part of their workflow. Curves can be very intimidating at first, but once you truly understand how to use them, they will substitute the sliders of Brightness/Contrast, Color Balance, Shadow/Highlights etc.

Back Lighting: Shooting and Editing

Lighting is key. It has an influence on just about everything we do when making an image. Light will affect what time of day we shoot, where we place our subject, our shutter speed, our aperture, how we edit the images, blah blah blah. You get the idea, right? Understanding and controlling light is crucial to the success of your work.

My Weekend With The Phase One IQ250 Camera System: Lifestyle, Swim, Beauty, Fashion, and On-The-Road Edition

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of testing out the Phase One IQ250, and so I thought I would put together a practical write up of my time spent the Phase One IQ250 Camera System, the Capture One software, and whether or not either one has found a permanent place in my workflow. As you’ve probably read by now, friend and fellow Fstoppers writer Zach Sutton recently covered his time spen

A Guide To Working With Male Models

It was something I’d been thinking about for a while. Casually admiring others and how they went about it so naturally. Watching from afar, admiring the differences between them and me and wondering if there every was going to be a day when I was comfortable enough to do it myself. The more I watched, the more interested I became.

creativeLIVE Photoshop Week Streaming LIVE Now

The folks over at creativeLIVE are broadcasting an entire week of photoshop classes. Classes kicked off Monday, February 24 and will continue to stream LIVE for free until Friday, February 28th.