Lightroom Workflow

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.

TourBox Elite Gets a Major Price Cut – Here's Why It's a Game-Changer for Lightroom Editors
News

TourBox Elite Gets a Major Price Cut – Here's Why It's a Game-Changer for Lightroom Editors

TourBox Elite Gets a Major Price Cut – Here’s Why It’s a Game-Changer for Lightroom Editors If you’ve ever found yourself tangled in keyboard shortcuts while trying to nail that perfect skin tone in Lightroom, or watched your mouse hand cramp during an eight-hour editing marathon, I’ve got some good news. The TourBox Elite is currently discounted by $92, and honestly? It might be one of the best investments you make for your editing setup this year.

How I Edit 200 Photos in 20 Minutes Using Lightroom's Batch Tools (Without Everything Looking the Same)
Lightroom Tutorials

How I Edit 200 Photos in 20 Minutes Using Lightroom's Batch Tools (Without Everything Looking the Same)

Last month I finished a 214-image shoot by midnight. I had the whole catalog exported by 12:47 AM. That’s not because I rushed, cut corners, or slapped one preset on everything and called it done. It’s because I’ve spent years building a batch editing system inside Lightroom Classic that actually respects the difference between a hero shot and a throwaway frame, and applies effort proportionally to both. Most photographers treat batch editing like a dirty shortcut.

The Art of Editing Magazine Cover Photography: Lessons From a Mexico Shoot
News

The Art of Editing Magazine Cover Photography: Lessons From a Mexico Shoot

The Weight of the Cover Shot There’s something almost magical about magazine covers in our digital age. While Instagram stories vanish in 24 hours and TikToks blur together in endless feeds, a cover sits on a newsstand. It demands attention. It gets printed. It matters. Recently, I had the opportunity to photograph a major editorial cover featuring an athlete most people recognize. Shooting in Mexico, far from the magazine’s home base, I realized something fundamental about editorial work: the editing process isn’t just technical refinement—it’s storytelling at its finest.

Why Your Exported Photos Look Nothing Like Your Lightroom Edits (And How to Fix It)
Tutorials

Why Your Exported Photos Look Nothing Like Your Lightroom Edits (And How to Fix It)

I had a client email me once asking why the headshots I delivered looked “washed out and kind of gray” compared to the previews I’d sent over iMessage. I’d spent two hours on those edits. Warm shadows, lifted blacks, a custom preset I’d built around a Gillian Welch record. They looked perfect on my screen. On hers, they looked like they’d been run through a photocopy machine. The edit wasn’t broken.

Stop Editing One Photo at a Time: A Real Workflow for Batch Editing in Lightroom
Workflow & Efficiency

Stop Editing One Photo at a Time: A Real Workflow for Batch Editing in Lightroom

Last Tuesday I had 847 photos from a single session sitting in Lightroom. Wedding, golden hour, outdoor ceremony, great light. The kind of shoot where everything goes right and you pay for it later in the culling process. My needle was playing through a Fleetwood Mac record and I had exactly four hours before delivery. I didn’t panic, because I’ve been here before. I batch edited the whole set in about ninety minutes and spent the remaining time on targeted fine-tuning.

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

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

A few years ago I released a preset pack on a Tuesday night, mostly because I’d spent the entire weekend building it and felt too stubborn to let it sit on my hard drive. I named every preset after a song, priced the pack at zero dollars, and went to bed. By Friday it had 50,000 downloads. The number wasn’t the surprising part. The surprising part was how many people emailed me to say the presets “weren’t working” because their photos looked nothing like the preview images on the download page.

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 called Slow Burn — named after a Kacey Musgraves track, because I name all my presets after songs and I’m not sorry about it. I built the whole thing over one long weekend, uploaded it for free, and watched it pull 50,000 downloads inside of a month. The flood of follow-up emails taught me something I hadn’t expected: most of the people using those presets were frustrated.

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)

A few years back, I built a preset pack over one long weekend. I barely slept. I named every preset after a song — “Harvest Moon” for that warm, golden-hour film look, “Blue Ridge” for cooler tones with lifted shadows, “Neon Noir” for the high-contrast, teal-and-orange edit that was everywhere on Instagram at the time. I put the whole pack together, decided it felt wrong to charge for it, and gave it away.