Video Tutorials

Two Lightroom Develop Panel Tricks That Changed How I Work (From Matt Kloskowski)
Video Tutorials

Two Lightroom Develop Panel Tricks That Changed How I Work (From Matt Kloskowski)

There’s a particular kind of frustration that hits mid-edit when you’re bouncing between the HSL panel and the Basic panel and Lightroom keeps slamming one shut every time you open the other. I’ve been there more times than I want to admit. Solo mode is supposed to be a feature, not a trap, but when you’re deep in a color grade and need two panels visible at once, it starts to feel like the software is working against you.

Lightroom Virtual Copies: The Fastest Way to Experiment Without Wrecking Your Edits
Video Tutorials

Lightroom Virtual Copies: The Fastest Way to Experiment Without Wrecking Your Edits

Every few months I revisit a photo I thought was finished and want to try something completely different with it. Maybe the color version I exported was fine, but I keep picturing it in black and white. Maybe my original edit was too conservative and I want to push the contrast harder. The problem is, I don’t want to lose the work I already put in. Duplicate the file? Now I’m managing two raw files and the catalog gets messy fast.

Fix Wonky Perspective in Lightroom With the Guided Upright Tool (It's Easier Than You Think)
Video Tutorials

Fix Wonky Perspective in Lightroom With the Guided Upright Tool (It's Easier Than You Think)

There’s a specific kind of frustration that hits when you nail the light, the moment, the composition - and then get home and realize the building in the background looks like it’s about to tip over. Wide-angle lenses are incredible for landscape and architectural work, but physics doesn’t care about your portfolio. The way light bends through a short focal length creates converging lines and skewed geometry that can turn a strong image into an awkward one.

Adobe Finally Gave Lightroom an AI Eraser That's Actually Worth Using
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Adobe Finally Gave Lightroom an AI Eraser That's Actually Worth Using

Every Lightroom user has a version of the same story. You spend twenty minutes getting a raw file exactly right, the tones are balanced, the colors are singing, and then you notice the power line cutting across the sky. Or the tourist walking through the background. Or the trash can that somehow ended up in the perfect composition. And just like that, you’re exporting to Photoshop, doing the thing, exporting back, and now you’ve got a TIFF sitting next to your raw file like a receipt you didn’t want.

I Switched to a Wacom Tablet for Lightroom Editing and I'm Not Going Back
Video Tutorials

I Switched to a Wacom Tablet for Lightroom Editing and I'm Not Going Back

I’ve been editing photos in Lightroom long enough to have strong opinions about things most people don’t notice, like the exact amount of friction a scroll wheel should have, or why the brush tool with a mouse feels like trying to paint with a bar of soap. For years I told myself the mouse was fine. It’s fine. Everyone uses a mouse. Then I watched Thomas Heaton pick up a Wacom Intuos Pro tablet for the first time and start editing like he’d been born with a stylus in his hand, and I felt that specific kind of creative jealousy that means you need to change something.

Why Your Lightroom Photos Look Banded and Funky (And How to Fix It)
Video Tutorials

Why Your Lightroom Photos Look Banded and Funky (And How to Fix It)

I’ve been editing photos in Lightroom long enough to know that the application has a gift for making you doubt yourself at exactly the wrong moment. You’re culling a shoot, you land on a landscape with a gorgeous gradient sky, and suddenly the sky looks like a television losing signal - horizontal lines cutting through what should be smooth, clean tones. Your stomach drops. You start mentally calculating whether your camera sensor is dying or your monitor is going bad.

Warm It Up: A Photoshop Layer-by-Layer Guide to Soft, Golden Fashion Tones
Video Tutorials

Warm It Up: A Photoshop Layer-by-Layer Guide to Soft, Golden Fashion Tones

There’s a specific problem I run into more than I’d like to admit. I shoot a portrait session on an overcast Nashville afternoon, pull the RAW files into Photoshop, and the whole thing looks like a dental office waiting room. Technically correct. Emotionally inert. The image needs warmth, not just a temperature slider drag, but a layered, intentional warmth that reads as a creative choice rather than a fix. That’s exactly the territory Jessica Kobeissi covers in her tutorial on creating a warm-toned fashion photo.

Bring Portraits to Life in Lightroom: Enhancing Eyes and Hair with the Adjustment Brush
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Bring Portraits to Life in Lightroom: Enhancing Eyes and Hair with the Adjustment Brush

There’s a specific kind of portrait that haunts you. The light was perfect, the subject was stunning, and then you open the file and realize the hair has collapsed into a muddy shadow and the eyes look flat. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit. For a long time my reflex was to jump straight into Photoshop and start reaching for luminosity masks. It worked, but it was slow, and half the time I was overcomplicating something that didn’t need to be complicated.

How to Build a Photography Style That's Actually Yours (A Lightroom Breakdown)
Video Tutorials

How to Build a Photography Style That's Actually Yours (A Lightroom Breakdown)

Every few months I’ll open my Lightroom catalog and feel that low-grade anxiety of looking at a grid of images that don’t quite belong together. Good photos, technically. But no thread connecting them. No sense that one person made all of these. If you’ve ever scrolled your own feed and thought “this looks like four different photographers,” this one’s for you. In this Nigel Danson tutorial, Watch the full tutorial on YouTube, Nigel tackles the question he says he gets asked more than anything else: how do you actually build a style?

Two Lightroom Tricks I Wish I'd Known During My First 1,000 Bracket Shots
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Two Lightroom Tricks I Wish I'd Known During My First 1,000 Bracket Shots

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from shooting a bracketed sequence at golden hour, getting home, and realizing you have to manually drag exposure sliders on eight nearly identical files just to compare them fairly. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit. Back when I was editing press shots for my band on a borrowed laptop, I developed some genuinely bad habits around bracketed editing, and some of those habits followed me into my professional workflow longer than they should have.

Why Lightroom Feels Slow When Browsing (And the Two-Step Fix That Actually Works)
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Why Lightroom Feels Slow When Browsing (And the Two-Step Fix That Actually Works)

There’s a specific kind of frustration that hits when you’ve just come back from a shoot with 400 raw files and Lightroom turns every arrow key press into a three-second waiting game. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit. Early on, I thought it was just the price of shooting raw. You take the slow rendering as payment for the flexibility. Turns out, I was wrong. I was just using Lightroom in the worst possible way for browsing.

Dehaze, Clarity, and Texture: The Lightroom Tools I Kept Getting Wrong (And How to Actually Use Them)
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Dehaze, Clarity, and Texture: The Lightroom Tools I Kept Getting Wrong (And How to Actually Use Them)

For a long time, I treated the Dehaze slider like that one guitar pedal you keep on your board but never actually turn on. Too risky, too unpredictable, too easy to ruin a shot that was almost there. Clarity I’d use occasionally, usually too aggressively, and texture felt like the polite, younger sibling of a tool I didn’t fully understand either. I knew something was off about how I was using them, but I couldn’t articulate why my results kept looking crunchy, strange, or just weirdly brown.