Lightroom Workflow

Why Your Lightroom Presets Look Nothing Like the Preview (And How to Fix That)
Lightroom Editing

Why Your Lightroom Presets Look Nothing Like the Preview (And How to Fix That)

I’ve watched the same thing happen to photographers at every skill level. They buy a preset pack, drop one onto a photo, and the result looks like a completely different product than the thumbnail they paid for. The highlights are blown. The colors are muddy. The mood that sold them on the purchase is nowhere. So they blame the presets, delete the pack, and go back to editing from scratch. Nine times out of ten, the presets weren’t the problem.

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.

Lightroom Presets Aren't Magic — But They're Pretty Close If You Know What's Inside Them
Lightroom Editing

Lightroom Presets Aren't Magic — But They're Pretty Close If You Know What's Inside Them

A few years back, I built a preset pack over a single long weekend. Named every preset after a Fleetwood Mac song, spent about 40 hours fine-tuning the tone curves, and then just… gave the whole thing away. No email capture, no upsell, nothing. It hit 50,000 downloads inside three months. What I learned from the comments, the DMs, and the forum threads that followed was uncomfortable: most people were applying those presets, deciding they looked “off,” and then cranking the exposure slider until the photo technically looked brighter.

Stop Using Finder to Review Photos. Use Adobe Bridge Instead.
Video Tutorials

Stop Using Finder to Review Photos. Use Adobe Bridge Instead.

I’ve been editing photos long enough to have strong opinions about almost every step of the process. Ask me about Lightroom versus Capture One sometime and bring a snack, because that conversation runs long. But here’s something I don’t argue about anymore: the moment between pulling your memory card and opening Lightroom is where most photographers quietly waste an embarrassing amount of time. Scrolling through tiny thumbnails in Finder or File Explorer, importing thousands of RAW files before you’ve even decided which ones are worth keeping, waiting on Lightroom’s import dialog to do its slow, grinding thing.

9 Single-Key Lightroom Shortcuts That Actually Stick (No Cheat Sheet Required)
Video Tutorials

9 Single-Key Lightroom Shortcuts That Actually Stick (No Cheat Sheet Required)

There’s a certain kind of editing session where everything flows. You’re moving through a catalog, the music is good (I’m partial to Carole King’s Tapestry on vinyl for landscape edits, if you’re asking), and your hands just know where to go. Then there’s the other kind of session, where you’re hunting through menus for tools you use every single day, clicking around like you’ve never opened the software before. The difference between those two sessions usually comes down to shortcuts.

Share a Photo Gallery With Anyone in Minutes Using Lightroom Classic's Built-In Web Feature
Video Tutorials

Share a Photo Gallery With Anyone in Minutes Using Lightroom Classic's Built-In Web Feature

Every December I edit a batch of photos I’ll never sell, never print, and never submit anywhere. They’re family shots, gig photos, candid stuff from the year. For a long time those images just lived on my hard drive in RAW format, which means they effectively didn’t exist as far as anyone else was concerned. I’d tell myself I’d get around to exporting them, uploading them somewhere, maybe building a little gallery.

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.

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.

Lightroom Presets Are Not Magic Buttons (But Here's How to Make Them Feel Like It)
Lightroom Editing

Lightroom Presets Are Not Magic Buttons (But Here's How to Make Them Feel Like It)

A few years back, I released a preset pack on a Tuesday night mostly because I couldn’t sleep. I’d spent the better part of a weekend building it, named every preset after a Wilco song, and figured maybe a hundred people would download it. By Friday it had 50,000 downloads. By the following Monday, my inbox was a disaster of people saying the presets “didn’t work” on their photos. That week taught me more about Lightroom presets than the previous three years of using them.

How I Edit 200 Photos in 20 Minutes Using Lightroom's Batch Tools (Without Making Them All Look the Same)
Workflow & Efficiency

How I Edit 200 Photos in 20 Minutes Using Lightroom's Batch Tools (Without Making Them All Look the Same)

Last spring I had a client deliver 340 RAW files from a single-day brand shoot. Same location, same subject, same lighting rig from 9am to 3pm. On paper, that sounds like a batch editor’s dream. Uniform conditions, predictable exposures, clean white balance. I figured I’d be done by dinner. I was done by midnight, and not because I was being precious about each frame. I was done at midnight because I kept chasing inconsistencies I created myself by applying the same global edits to shots that, despite looking identical at a glance, had subtly different exposure values, different distances from the strobe, and different amounts of ambient window light creeping in as the afternoon wore on.

One Edit, 847 Photos: How Batch Editing in Lightroom Actually Works
Workflow & Efficiency

One Edit, 847 Photos: How Batch Editing in Lightroom Actually Works

Last spring I delivered a 900-image wedding gallery in about four hours of editing time. The couple cried when they saw it. The photographer who hired me as a second editor sent a follow-up asking how I turned around work that fast without it looking like a machine had processed every frame. The honest answer is that a machine did process most of it. I just told the machine exactly what to do.

One Catalog to Rule Them All: How to Set Up a Travel Catalog That Actually Merges Back Cleanly
Video Tutorials

One Catalog to Rule Them All: How to Set Up a Travel Catalog That Actually Merges Back Cleanly

I have a recurring nightmare. Not the one where I show up to a shoot and forgot my memory cards. The one where I get home from a week of shooting, dump everything into my laptop catalog, and then spend two hours Googling “how to merge Lightroom catalogs without losing edits” at midnight. If you’ve been there, you know the specific dread of not being sure whether your metadata survived the trip.