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Luminar's Bold Rebrand: What It Means for Your Editing Workflow
News

Luminar's Bold Rebrand: What It Means for Your Editing Workflow

Luminar’s Bold Rebrand: What It Means for Your Editing Workflow I’ve been watching the AI-powered editing space pretty closely lately, and I have to say—Skylum just made a move that caught my attention. Today marks the arrival of Luminar’s version 1.28.0, but this isn’t just another incremental update. This is the beginning of something bigger: the app is shedding its “Neo” suffix and reclaiming its original identity as simply Luminar.

Lightroom's New Portrait Masking Tools Are the Biggest Skin-Editing Leap in Years
Video Tutorials

Lightroom's New Portrait Masking Tools Are the Biggest Skin-Editing Leap in Years

Portrait editing used to be the part of my workflow I’d put on in the background while I went to make coffee. Click a few sliders, dodge some shadows under the eyes, call it done. But client expectations have shifted, and lately I’ve been getting asked to deliver retouching that would have taken me into Photoshop two years ago. So when Adobe dropped the October 2022 update to Lightroom Classic, I needed to know exactly what was new and whether any of it would actually save me time on a real session.

Stop Emailing Photos to Yourself: Sync Lightroom Classic Collections to Your Phone in Minutes
Video Tutorials

Stop Emailing Photos to Yourself: Sync Lightroom Classic Collections to Your Phone in Minutes

Every photographer I know has a version of the same embarrassing habit. You finish editing a set of photos on your desktop, and then you either email them to yourself, drop them in a random Google Drive folder, or AirDrop them to your phone while standing awkwardly close to your own computer. I did this for longer than I want to admit. The whole time, the answer was sitting right inside Lightroom Classic, one right-click away.

The Lightroom Tricks I Wish I'd Known Before Wasting 500 Hours Editing the Hard Way
Video Tutorials

The Lightroom Tricks I Wish I'd Known Before Wasting 500 Hours Editing the Hard Way

Every editor has a turning point. Mine came embarrassingly late. I was two years into editing photos for a local music scene in Nashville, spending 45 minutes per image tweaking sliders I didn’t fully understand, when a photographer friend leaned over my shoulder and said, “Why are you doing it that way?” Turns out I had been fighting Lightroom’s architecture instead of working with it. That experience is exactly why I keep coming back to tutorials from creators who clearly live inside this software.

What Lightroom Presets Actually Do (And Why Most People Use Them Wrong)
Lightroom Tutorials

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

I named my first preset pack after a Wilco album. Not because it was clever branding, but because I made the whole thing in one weekend while “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” played on repeat, and by Sunday night I couldn’t separate the two things in my memory. That pack got 50,000 downloads after I posted it for free in a Facebook group, which taught me two things: people are hungry for good presets, and almost nobody actually knows how to use them.

Browse, Mask, Retouch: Lightroom Mobile's Newest Features Make On-the-Go Editing Actually Good
Video Tutorials

Browse, Mask, Retouch: Lightroom Mobile's Newest Features Make On-the-Go Editing Actually Good

My phone has about 4,000 unedited photos on it. Not because I’m lazy, but because the import-edit-export pipeline on mobile has always felt like homework. By the time I’ve pulled the images into Lightroom, I’ve lost the momentum I had when I took the shot. That friction is a creativity killer, and it’s the reason I kept defaulting to desktop even for quick edits I genuinely could have handled on my phone.

Adobe's New AI Masking Is the Local Adjustment Upgrade I Didn't Know I Needed
Video Tutorials

Adobe's New AI Masking Is the Local Adjustment Upgrade I Didn't Know I Needed

For years, my local adjustment workflow in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw felt like managing a cluttered desk. Pins scattered across the canvas, no clear visual reference for which adjustment was doing what, and a lot of hovering and guessing. I knew the tools were powerful, I just had to hold a lot of context in my head while using them. When Adobe rolled out their 2021 masking overhaul, I honestly didn’t expect it to change much.

Where Are All My Gigabytes Going? How to Hunt Down and Delete Bloated Lightroom Files
Video Tutorials

Where Are All My Gigabytes Going? How to Hunt Down and Delete Bloated Lightroom Files

My catalog is a crime scene. Not in an artistic way. I mean there are PSDs in there from 2015 that I abandoned mid-edit, TIFFs that got generated when I round-tripped a photo to Photoshop once and never looked at it again, and at least three different versions of the same bad HDR shot that I should have deleted the same night I made it. Sound familiar? This is one of those problems that sneaks up on you slowly, gigabyte by gigabyte, until suddenly your drive is nearly full and you have no idea why.

Fix White Balance Across an Entire Shoot in Seconds (The Tethered and Non-Tethered Way)
Video Tutorials

Fix White Balance Across an Entire Shoot in Seconds (The Tethered and Non-Tethered Way)

There is a specific kind of misery that comes from finishing a three-hour portrait session, loading 400 images into Lightroom, and realizing the white balance is wrong on every single one. I’ve been there more times than I want to admit. Early on, when I was editing press shots for my band because we genuinely couldn’t afford to hire someone, I used to fix white balance manually, image by image, like some kind of digital monk.

How to Edit Stadium Architecture Shots Using HDR Merge and Targeted Brushwork in Lightroom
Video Tutorials

How to Edit Stadium Architecture Shots Using HDR Merge and Targeted Brushwork in Lightroom

Shooting large interior spaces is one of those situations where a single exposure almost always fails you. The ceiling goes muddy, the sky through an open roof blows out, and the field sits somewhere in between looking like neither highlight nor shadow was handled correctly. It’s the kind of image that makes you feel like you did something wrong in camera, when really the problem is just dynamic range. Your sensor physically cannot capture it all in one shot.

RIP to the Done Button: What Lightroom Actually Wants You to Do Instead
Video Tutorials

RIP to the Done Button: What Lightroom Actually Wants You to Do Instead

Every time Adobe quietly removes something from Lightroom Classic, my inbox fills up like a rain barrel in a Nashville thunderstorm. The Done button is the latest casualty, and honestly, I get it. When something you’ve clicked a thousand times just vanishes, it feels like Adobe rearranged your kitchen while you were sleeping. But after watching this Matt Kloskowski tutorial on exactly that topic, I walked away thinking less about the button itself and more about how many of us were doing things the hard way without even realizing it.

The Art of Restraint: Why Minimal Editing Might Be Your Most Powerful Skill
News

The Art of Restraint: Why Minimal Editing Might Be Your Most Powerful Skill

The Case for Less I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the paradox of modern photo editing. We have more tools than ever before—sliders upon sliders, presets galore, AI-powered adjustments that feel like magic. Yet some of the most compelling images I encounter are barely touched. There’s something genuinely refreshing about a photograph that knows when to stop. This month, I’ve been observing a growing conversation in the photography community about what “minimally edited” actually means.