Lightroom Classic

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

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

How to Merge Bracketed Exposures into a Stunning HDR Image Using Lightroom Classic
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How to Merge Bracketed Exposures into a Stunning HDR Image Using Lightroom Classic

There is a specific kind of frustration that hits when you nail the composition, the moment is perfect, and then you pull the image up on your screen and realize the sky is completely blown out while the interior is drowning in shadow. Your camera saw the scene differently than your eyes did, and no amount of pushing sliders is going to recover detail that was never captured in the first place.

Lightroom Classic vs. Lightroom vs. Lightroom Mobile: Which One Actually Belongs in Your Workflow?
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Lightroom Classic vs. Lightroom vs. Lightroom Mobile: Which One Actually Belongs in Your Workflow?

For a long time, I assumed everyone already knew there were three separate Lightroom applications. Then I started getting the same question over and over from readers: “Wait, which Lightroom am I supposed to download?” It’s a genuinely confusing situation, and Adobe hasn’t exactly made it easy to understand at a glance. If you’ve ever stared at the Creative Cloud app and wondered why there are multiple entries for what feels like the same program, this breakdown is for you.

Lightroom's April 2023 Update Has One Feature That Actually Changes How I Edit
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Lightroom's April 2023 Update Has One Feature That Actually Changes How I Edit

Noise has always been the tax you pay for shooting in low light. You get the shot, you get the grain, and then you spend an uncomfortable amount of time in the Detail panel trying to recover something that looks like a photograph and not a bowl of oatmeal. I’ve tried every third-party plugin, every slider combination, every “just add a little luminance reduction and pray” workaround. Some of them work okay.

Work Smarter in Lightroom: How Batch Editing Saves Hours on Every Shoot
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Work Smarter in Lightroom: How Batch Editing Saves Hours on Every Shoot

There’s a version of me from about six years ago who spent three hours editing forty-seven press photos one by one. Same lighting conditions, same camera, same location — and I manually adjusted every single frame like some kind of masochist. If I’d known then what I know now about batch editing in Lightroom Classic, I could have wrapped that job before the record finished spinning. That’s not an exaggeration. Batch editing is genuinely one of those techniques that changes how you think about post-processing.

Lightroom Classic 7.5 Just Fixed Three Things That Were Driving Me Crazy
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Lightroom Classic 7.5 Just Fixed Three Things That Were Driving Me Crazy

Every time Adobe drops a Lightroom update, I do the same thing. I open the release notes, skim past the “performance improvements,” and hunt for anything that actually changes how I work. Most updates are quiet. Version 7.5, which Adobe pushed out in the third week of August 2018, is not one of those quiet updates. It’s got three specific changes that solve problems I’ve been working around for months.

Stop Drowning in Photos: How to Cull Your Lightroom Catalog Like a Pro
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Stop Drowning in Photos: How to Cull Your Lightroom Catalog Like a Pro

Coming back from a shoot with 800 raw files is one of those problems that sounds like a good problem until you’re actually sitting in front of it at 11pm. I used to just start from the top and delete anything obviously bad, which meant I spent most of my energy on the garbage instead of the gold. It wasn’t until I started treating culling as its own deliberate phase of the workflow, completely separate from editing, that my output quality actually improved.

Lightroom vs. Lightroom Classic: A Working Photographer's Tour of the Cloud-Based App
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Lightroom vs. Lightroom Classic: A Working Photographer's Tour of the Cloud-Based App

I’ll be honest with you. For years I was a Lightroom Classic loyalist. Classic felt like home base, the place where my catalogs lived, where my presets (named after Wilco songs, naturally) were organized just the way I liked them. The cloud-based version of Lightroom felt like a younger sibling I hadn’t bothered to get to know. Then my editing workflow got messier as I started shooting more on the go, and I needed a way to access and edit images across devices without driving myself crazy.

Camera-Specific Defaults and Sync FAQ: What Actually Changed in Lightroom Classic 9.2
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Camera-Specific Defaults and Sync FAQ: What Actually Changed in Lightroom Classic 9.2

Every time Adobe drops an update, I do the same thing: open the release notes, skim for anything that affects my actual workflow, and ignore the rest. Most updates are minor. But the February 2020 update to Lightroom Classic was one I kept coming back to, because it quietly fixed something that had been annoying me for years. I shoot with two different Sony bodies depending on the job, and getting each one to open with sensible default settings has always involved too many steps and too much memory for what those steps even were.

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

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.