Lightroom

How to Edit Moody Landscape Photos in Lightroom: 6 Steps That Actually Work
Video Tutorials

How to Edit Moody Landscape Photos in Lightroom: 6 Steps That Actually Work

There’s a specific kind of landscape photo that stops you mid-scroll. Dark, atmospheric, a little unsettling. The kind of image where the fog does half the storytelling and the edit does the other half. I’ve been chasing that look for years, and I’ll admit I used to think it was mostly about being in the right place at the right time. It’s not. It’s mostly about knowing what to do with the raw file once you’re back home.

The Secret Color Grading Superpowers You Already Own
News

The Secret Color Grading Superpowers You Already Own

The Art of Mood Without the Mess I’ve been thinking about color grading a lot lately, and here’s what keeps me up at night: the difference between a stunning edit and a catastrophically oversaturated mess often comes down to one simple decision—knowing when to hold back. Color grading is like seasoning a dish. Too much and you’ve ruined dinner. But when you nail it? Magic happens. You can take two photographs of the exact same subject, shot under completely different lighting conditions, and make them tell the same visual story.

How to Remove Anyone From a Photo in Lightroom (Without Breaking a Sweat)
Video Tutorials

How to Remove Anyone From a Photo in Lightroom (Without Breaking a Sweat)

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes with a technically perfect shot that has a stranger’s elbow in the corner, or a lighting assistant visible in the background. I’ve been there more times than I care to admit. Back when I was editing press photos for my band on a zero-dollar budget, every person in the background of a shot was a problem I had to solve in software, usually badly, usually late at night.

Adobe Lightroom's New AI Masking Is Almost Too Easy (And I Have Feelings About That)
Video Tutorials

Adobe Lightroom's New AI Masking Is Almost Too Easy (And I Have Feelings About That)

Every few months Adobe drops an update that genuinely changes how I work, and every few months I have to decide whether I’m excited or quietly unsettled. Sometimes it’s both at once. When I saw the new masking features land in Lightroom recently, I opened the app, sat down with a coffee, and pulled up Watch the full tutorial on YouTube from Peter McKinnon, who had already done the work of poking around in the new tools and thinking out loud about them.

Lightroom 12.3 Just Changed How I Handle Noise and Masking — Here's What You Need to Know
Video Tutorials

Lightroom 12.3 Just Changed How I Handle Noise and Masking — Here's What You Need to Know

Every few months Adobe drops an update that makes me reconsider a chunk of my workflow. Most of the time it’s incremental, a slider moved, a panel reorganized. But the April 2023 release of Lightroom Classic 12.3 landed differently. It touched two areas I deal with constantly: noise reduction and masking. And in both cases, the changes weren’t cosmetic. In this Matt Kloskowski tutorial, he walks through the new Denoise button and the expanded masking options that shipped with version 12.

Stop Drowning in Bracket Photos: A Smarter Way to Manage HDR Shoots in Lightroom
Video Tutorials

Stop Drowning in Bracket Photos: A Smarter Way to Manage HDR Shoots in Lightroom

Every time I come back from a shoot with bracketed exposures, I face the same low-grade dread: opening Lightroom to find what feels like a thousand nearly identical frames staring back at me. Nine brackets per scene, multiplied across an afternoon of walking around downtown Nashville, and suddenly I’m not editing photos anymore. I’m just managing files. That’s not why I picked up a camera. This KelbyOne tutorial from Matt Kloskowski landed in my feed at exactly the right moment.

Lightroom's HDR Merge Hides a Noise Reduction Superpower Most Photographers Miss
Video Tutorials

Lightroom's HDR Merge Hides a Noise Reduction Superpower Most Photographers Miss

I shoot a lot of musicians. Nashville is full of them, and a good chunk of my editing time is spent rescuing dark venue shots where the shadows look like someone shook a snow globe over the image. For years I treated Lightroom’s built-in HDR merge as a gimmick — something for real estate photographers and sunset chasers. Then I watched a KelbyOne tutorial that reframed the whole feature, and I felt that particular flavor of embarrassed that comes from ignoring a tool that was sitting right there.

Stop Missing Sensor Spots Before You Print: The Lightroom Trick I Wish I'd Known Sooner
Video Tutorials

Stop Missing Sensor Spots Before You Print: The Lightroom Trick I Wish I'd Known Sooner

There is a specific kind of dread that only photographers know. It hits somewhere between handing someone a large print and watching their eyes drift to a smudge in the upper third of the image. Sensor dust. The gift that keeps giving, because whatever wrecked one frame wrecked every frame shot at that aperture. I have been editing seriously for almost a decade and I still catch myself skipping the spot-check step when I’m in a hurry.

Why You're Probably Shooting (and Stitching) Panoramas Wrong in Lightroom
Video Tutorials

Why You're Probably Shooting (and Stitching) Panoramas Wrong in Lightroom

There’s a particular kind of pain that comes from getting home after a long shoot, opening Lightroom, selecting your pano sequence, hitting Merge, and watching the result come out warped, misaligned, or with exposure banding across the frame. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit. The frustrating part is that the problem almost always started on location, not in the software. That’s why this tutorial from Mark Denney caught my attention immediately.

Why Your Colors Look Flat After Editing (And the HSL Fix Nobody Talks About)
Color Grading

Why Your Colors Look Flat After Editing (And the HSL Fix Nobody Talks About)

I was editing a portrait session last spring when I realized the skin tones looked like someone had smeared a thin coat of caramel over a gray wall. The colors were technically correct. White balance was dialed in. Exposure was clean. But something about the image felt defeated, like it was trying its best and still coming up short. The problem wasn’t the exposure. It wasn’t the white balance. It was the hue shift that happens when you push saturation without touching luminance.

Lightroom Tips I Wish I'd Known in Year One (Peter McKinnon's 10-Tip Breakdown)
Video Tutorials

Lightroom Tips I Wish I'd Known in Year One (Peter McKinnon's 10-Tip Breakdown)

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from using a tool every day and slowly realizing you’ve been ignoring half of it. I came to Lightroom the hard way. Our band needed press shots, nobody wanted to pay a photographer, and I ended up being the guy who figured out post-processing by necessity. For years, I was dragging sliders around with no system, no shortcuts, and no real understanding of what the software could actually do.

White Snow, Warm Mess: 7 Lightroom Fixes That Actually Work on Winter Photos
Video Tutorials

White Snow, Warm Mess: 7 Lightroom Fixes That Actually Work on Winter Photos

Every January I open a folder of winter shots and think the same thing: why does my snow look like a gas station slushie? Sometimes it’s blue from a clear sky acting as a giant overhead reflector. Sometimes it’s that flat, greenish-gray you get from overcast light. Either way, the camera captured it faithfully and Lightroom handed me a problem to solve. Winter editing isn’t hard in the way that, say, compositing is hard.