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Lightroom's Adaptive Presets Finally Made Me a Preset Person (And I've Been Resisting for Years)
Video Tutorials

Lightroom's Adaptive Presets Finally Made Me a Preset Person (And I've Been Resisting for Years)

There’s a version of me from about two years ago who would have rolled his eyes at presets. Hard. I named my own presets after Wilco songs and built every mask by hand because I believed that was the only honest way to edit a photo. Then I watched Thomas Heaton — a landscape photographer I respect precisely because he’s methodical and unsentimental about gear and software — admit on camera that he’d been running an outdated version of Lightroom for so long that he used it during a paid Adobe presentation.

Lightroom From the Top: How Tony Northrup's Culling-First Workflow Will Change How You Edit
Video Tutorials

Lightroom From the Top: How Tony Northrup's Culling-First Workflow Will Change How You Edit

Every photographer I know has the same problem: a memory card full of 300+ shots from one session, a vague intention to “edit those later,” and a folder that never gets touched again. I fell into this exact trap when I was editing press photos for my band on zero budget, learning Lightroom by trial and error with no system whatsoever. The editing wasn’t the hard part. The chaos before the editing was.

Stop Fixing Colors Globally — Here's How to Dial In Each One Individually in Lightroom
Video Tutorials

Stop Fixing Colors Globally — Here's How to Dial In Each One Individually in Lightroom

Every time I hand off an edited landscape or portrait to a client, I think about how badly my early work would have embarrassed me. Back when I was cutting my teeth on Lightroom, editing my band’s press shots in a Nashville apartment at midnight, I treated color like a single dial. Warm it up, crank the vibrance, call it done. The results looked like a sunset filter threw up on a perfectly decent photo.

The Hidden Hours: Can AI Finally Solve Video Color Grading's Dirty Work?
News

The Hidden Hours: Can AI Finally Solve Video Color Grading's Dirty Work?

The Unsexy Side of Professional Color Grading Let me be honest—the creative part of color grading is chef’s kiss. Those moments when you nail the mood, dial in the perfect teal and orange aesthetic, and transform a flat image into something cinematic? That’s why we got into this. That’s the dream. But here’s the reality nobody talks about in those Instagram reels: before you get to touch a single creative slider, you’re spending hours—hours—just making your footage look technically consistent.

Stop Letting Your Lightroom Collections Turn Into a Junk Drawer (Use Collection Sets Instead)
Video Tutorials

Stop Letting Your Lightroom Collections Turn Into a Junk Drawer (Use Collection Sets Instead)

My Lightroom catalog used to look like the back seat of a touring van. Photos everywhere, collections named things like “final_REAL_v3,” no logical hierarchy, just a long scrolling list of panic. When you’re importing shoots constantly, organization is the thing that always feels like it can wait until later. Later never comes. Collection Sets fixed that for me, and I genuinely wish someone had walked me through them when I was starting out.

Lightroom Just Split in Two — Here's What That Actually Means for Your Editing Workflow
Video Tutorials

Lightroom Just Split in Two — Here's What That Actually Means for Your Editing Workflow

Every few months I get the same message from readers: “My Lightroom looks different and I don’t know what happened.” Usually it’s a minor UI shuffle. This time, though, Adobe made a move significant enough that I spent a good chunk of my week digging through the changes before I felt comfortable writing about them. The short version is that Lightroom is no longer one app. It’s two. And depending on where you are in your photography journey, that’s either great news or mildly annoying news.

Lightroom Mobile Is More Powerful Than You Think — Here's the Proof
Video Tutorials

Lightroom Mobile Is More Powerful Than You Think — Here's the Proof

I resisted Lightroom’s cloud-based desktop and mobile app for an embarrassingly long time. I had my Classic catalog, my folder structure, my backup drives humming under my desk like old friends. The idea of handing my raw files over to the cloud felt like trading a filing cabinet for a promise. Then I actually started using it, and I owe a small apology to the app I ignored for two years.

Lightroom's Masking Tools Are Smarter Than You Think — Here's How to Actually Use Them
Tutorials

Lightroom's Masking Tools Are Smarter Than You Think — Here's How to Actually Use Them

I was editing a portrait session last spring, rushing to get a gallery delivered before my copy of Rumours finished its second side, when I realized I’d been doing it wrong for years. Not wrong-wrong. Just inefficient. I was still painting adjustment brushes over skies by hand like it was 2015, carefully avoiding tree branches like I was defusing something. Then I clicked “Select Sky” in the Masking panel and watched Lightroom trace every pine needle in about four seconds.

Stop Fighting Flat RAWs: How Camera Profiles and Color Targets Fix Your White Balance at the Source
Video Tutorials

Stop Fighting Flat RAWs: How Camera Profiles and Color Targets Fix Your White Balance at the Source

Every photographer I know has spent too much time dragging the Contrast slider back and forth trying to resurrect a flat, muddy RAW file. I did it for years. Back when I was editing press shots for my band on a borrowed laptop, I thought contrast was something you added manually, like salt to a recipe. Turns out I was starting from the wrong ingredient entirely. That’s the core lesson in this CreativeLive tutorial on color management policies in Lightroom.

Stop Noise From Ruining Your Wildlife and Nature Shots (A Lightroom Brush Technique Worth Knowing)
Video Tutorials

Stop Noise From Ruining Your Wildlife and Nature Shots (A Lightroom Brush Technique Worth Knowing)

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from nailing a wildlife shot, getting the exposure right, holding your breath long enough for the bird to turn its head just so, and then zooming in at your desk to find the background looks like a bowl of colored gravel. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit. Noisy backgrounds don’t just look bad on their own. They actively pull the viewer’s eye away from your subject, which is the one thing you actually cared about when you pressed the shutter.

Lightroom Web Is Better Than You Think — Here's What Adobe Just Added
Video Tutorials

Lightroom Web Is Better Than You Think — Here's What Adobe Just Added

I’ve been a Lightroom guy for a long time. Long enough that I have an embarrassingly large catalog, presets named after Wilco songs, and genuine opinions about tone curve shapes. But I’ll be honest with you: I had basically written off Lightroom web. I poked at it a couple of years ago, thought “that’s cute,” and went back to the desktop app. Big mistake. Katrin Eismann’s recent session for KelbyOne, filmed around Adobe Max, changed that.

Why Your Digital Photos Look Too Clean (And How Film Emulation Fixes It)
Color Grading

Why Your Digital Photos Look Too Clean (And How Film Emulation Fixes It)

The Problem With Perfectly Sharp Photos I was editing a batch of golden hour portraits last fall, technically perfect exposures, tack-sharp focus, clean shadows. And they looked completely lifeless. My client kept saying “they’re beautiful but something feels off,” which is the most frustrating sentence a photographer can hear because she wasn’t wrong. What she was picking up on, without knowing the vocabulary for it, is something I call the digital sterility problem.