Lightroom is a deceptively powerful program, and you can accomplish a great deal in it without having to turn to Photoshop or some other application. This fantastic video tutorial gives seven great tricks and techniques for taking more control of your Lightroom experience and creating better images.
Coming to you from Nigel Danson, this helpful video tutorial discusses seven tips and techniques for getting more done in Lightroom. One of my favorites is using web collections. I already use collections for organizing my catalog, but web collections are particularly great, as they sync any images you put in them to Lightroom Mobile. This allows you to edit on the go using your phone or tablet, with any changes you make synced back to your computer. I actually use them mostly for culling. When I have a large set of a few thousand images to cull from an event or the like, I load them into a web collection that syncs to my phone; then, whenever I am standing in line somewhere or just need to pass 10 minutes of time, I will pull out my phone and work through a few hundred images. It makes a tedious process much easier. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Danson.
Or Adobe could just fix the bugs, the performance problems, the endless waiting for images to load, the weird endless crashes and other things that irritate us professionals. Maybe then we can actually recommend LR instead of criticize this bloated software to all who ask our opinion. Just a thought. Oh wait, Adobe is too busy counting their profits to actually fix things. Never mind.
I've used LR for most of its life. I've had performance issues in the past, and there are a few areas (Print module comes to mind) that could really benefit from a UI overhaul. But it never crashes on me, and performance on my new mid level desktop is quite good. Over the last couple of years I've watched several of Nigel's videos and this one was one of the most useful for me. Specifically, I had never realized you can edit the mask in LR. And the way he uses brushes for dodging and burning is an improvement over what I currently do. LR and the video work well for me.