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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.

The Hidden Power of Color: How Photography Secretly Shaped American Conservation
News

The Hidden Power of Color: How Photography Secretly Shaped American Conservation

The Photograph That Changed Everything (But Nobody Remembers) Here’s something that blew my mind: one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in American history—the law that created Yellowstone National Park in 1872—barely mentions photographs at all. Yet those images were absolutely everywhere in the conversation that led to its passage. President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill on March 1st, 1872, and the official text reads like a bureaucratic snooze fest.

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

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.

How to Edit 500 Photos in the Time It Usually Takes You to Edit 20
Workflow & Efficiency

How to Edit 500 Photos in the Time It Usually Takes You to Edit 20

Last spring I agreed to cover a friend’s wedding as a favor. Not as the photographer, just as a backup shooter with a mirrorless camera and a wide-angle lens. Three hours later I had 600 raw files, a headache, and a very clear reminder of why I stopped shooting events. The editing wasn’t the problem. The volume was. And if you’ve ever come home from a shoot, opened Lightroom, and felt your stomach drop at the number in the bottom corner of your catalog, you know exactly what I mean.

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
Video Tutorials

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?

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

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

A few years ago I released a preset pack on a Tuesday afternoon, mostly as an experiment. By Friday it had 50,000 downloads. I hadn’t charged a cent for it. The emails I got back were mostly some version of the same sentence: “I applied the preset and it looks nothing like your example photo.” That told me everything I needed to know about how people misunderstand what presets actually are.