Lightroom editing, color grading & visual storytelling

Lightroom editing, color grading & visual storytelling — by Alex Rowe

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Split Toning in Lightroom: How Two Colors Can Make or Break the Whole Mood of a Photo
Color Grading

Split Toning in Lightroom: How Two Colors Can Make or Break the Whole Mood of a Photo

I have a preset I built about three years ago called “Rumours.” Warm golden shadows, slightly cool highlights, the kind of look that makes a portrait feel like it was shot in a California living room in 1977. I named it after the Fleetwood Mac album because that’s the mood I was chasing when I built it. I’ve used it on maybe two dozen client galleries since then, and people consistently ask me how I got “that color.

Lightroom's Lens Blur Tool: Finally Getting That Bokeh Right in Post-Production
News

Lightroom's Lens Blur Tool: Finally Getting That Bokeh Right in Post-Production

Lightroom’s Lens Blur Tool: Finally Getting That Bokeh Right in Post-Production I’ve spent enough time in Lightroom to know which tools actually deliver and which ones are just taking up panel real estate. When Adobe introduced the Lens Blur feature to Lightroom Classic, I’ll admit I was skeptical. Can software really fake what a fast lens and proper aperture do in-camera? Turns out, the answer is more nuanced than a simple yes or no.

Stop Manually Dragging Sliders Back to Zero — There's a Much Faster Way
Video Tutorials

Stop Manually Dragging Sliders Back to Zero — There's a Much Faster Way

Last week I was doing a second pass on a batch of live music shots, the kind where you’ve already applied a sync across fifty frames and then realize the Texture slider is doing something weird on half of them. My usual move was to grab each slider and drag it back toward zero, squinting at the number until I landed close enough. Close enough. That’s not a workflow, that’s a nervous habit.

How to Edit a Sunrise RAW File When the Sky Is Already Doing the Work
Video Tutorials

How to Edit a Sunrise RAW File When the Sky Is Already Doing the Work

There’s a specific kind of editing panic that hits when a shot is already beautiful straight out of camera. You open the RAW file, the colors are wild, the light is doing something genuinely magical, and suddenly every adjustment feels like you’re either underselling it or wrecking it. I hit that exact wall last spring shooting golden hour along the Cumberland River. The sky was doing everything right. I did too much in post.

Split Toning Is the Difference Between a Good Edit and a Memorable One
Color Grading

Split Toning Is the Difference Between a Good Edit and a Memorable One

I had a folder of band press shots sitting on my desktop for three days before I figured out what was wrong with them. The exposure was right. The white balance was dialed. The skin tones looked natural. And the photos were completely, aggressively boring. They looked like stock photos of musicians rather than actual musicians. It wasn’t until I added a warm amber to the shadows and a faint blue to the highlights that the whole thing clicked.

What Lightroom Presets Actually Do to Your Files (And Why Most People Use Them Wrong)
Lightroom Editing

What Lightroom Presets Actually Do to Your Files (And Why Most People Use Them Wrong)

A few years ago I released a preset pack on a Tuesday night, mostly because I’d spent the entire weekend building it and felt too stubborn to let it sit on my hard drive. I named every preset after a song, priced the pack at zero dollars, and went to bed. By Friday it had 50,000 downloads. The number wasn’t the surprising part. The surprising part was how many people emailed me to say the presets “weren’t working” because their photos looked nothing like the preview images on the download page.

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