Lightroom

Lightroom's February 2026 Update Just Changed How I Start Every Edit
Video Tutorials

Lightroom's February 2026 Update Just Changed How I Start Every Edit

Every time Adobe drops a Lightroom update, I do the same thing. I clear my afternoon, brew coffee, and sit down expecting a revelation. Sometimes I get one. Sometimes I get WebP support and a button that opens a web browser. The February 2026 update lands somewhere in the middle, and I want to be straight with you about that before you spend an hour hunting for features that aren’t really there.

The Lightroom Conference 2025 Is Coming — Here's Why I Clear My Calendar Every Year
Video Tutorials

The Lightroom Conference 2025 Is Coming — Here's Why I Clear My Calendar Every Year

There’s a particular kind of editing fatigue that creeps in after a few years of winging it in Lightroom. You know the one. You’re dragging the same sliders to roughly the same places, your export folder is a graveyard of “final_FINAL_v3” files, and somewhere in the back of your mind you’re aware that you’re probably using maybe 40 percent of what the software can actually do. I’ve been there. I spent years teaching myself Lightroom out of necessity, back when I was editing band press shots on a laptop in a van, and while I got good at it, I also built some deeply inefficient habits that took a long time to unlearn.

What This Year's Ocean Photography Winners Can Teach Us About Color Grading
News

What This Year's Ocean Photography Winners Can Teach Us About Color Grading

What This Year’s Ocean Photography Winners Can Teach Us About Color Grading The United Nations just crowned the champions of their World Oceans Day photography competition, and I’ve been absolutely mesmerized by what won. Not just because the images are stunning—though they absolutely are—but because they showcase some seriously thoughtful color grading decisions that we can all learn from. Competing in the Deep Blue This year’s edition introduced a fresh category called “Connecting Oceans,” which feels like the perfect evolution for a competition that’s grown increasingly competitive.

The RAW Processing Step I Kept Skipping (And Why I Finally Stopped)
Video Tutorials

The RAW Processing Step I Kept Skipping (And Why I Finally Stopped)

I have a rule about my editing workflow: if it adds more than one extra step, it probably isn’t sticking around. I learned Lightroom under pressure, back when my band couldn’t afford a photographer and someone had to edit our press shots, so lean and fast became a survival instinct that never really left. That instinct has served me well. It has also made me dismiss a lot of genuinely useful tools because I assumed the setup cost wasn’t worth it.

Lightroom's Quietly Dropped Two Masking Features That Change Everything About Local Adjustments
Video Tutorials

Lightroom's Quietly Dropped Two Masking Features That Change Everything About Local Adjustments

Color grading has always felt like one of those tools that’s 90% of the way there. The ability to push your highlights toward gold, nudge your shadows into teal, or breathe some cinematic warmth into your midtones is genuinely powerful. I use it on almost every landscape and portrait edit I touch. But for years, there’s been this maddening ceiling on what it can do: color grading applies globally, across the entire image, based on tonal values alone.

Split Toning in Lightroom: How Two Colors Can Make or Break the Whole Mood of a Photo
Color Grading

Split Toning in Lightroom: How Two Colors Can Make or Break the Whole Mood of a Photo

I have a preset I built about three years ago called “Rumours.” Warm golden shadows, slightly cool highlights, the kind of look that makes a portrait feel like it was shot in a California living room in 1977. I named it after the Fleetwood Mac album because that’s the mood I was chasing when I built it. I’ve used it on maybe two dozen client galleries since then, and people consistently ask me how I got “that color.

Lightroom's Lens Blur Tool: Finally Getting That Bokeh Right in Post-Production
News

Lightroom's Lens Blur Tool: Finally Getting That Bokeh Right in Post-Production

Lightroom’s Lens Blur Tool: Finally Getting That Bokeh Right in Post-Production I’ve spent enough time in Lightroom to know which tools actually deliver and which ones are just taking up panel real estate. When Adobe introduced the Lens Blur feature to Lightroom Classic, I’ll admit I was skeptical. Can software really fake what a fast lens and proper aperture do in-camera? Turns out, the answer is more nuanced than a simple yes or no.

Stop Manually Dragging Sliders Back to Zero — There's a Much Faster Way
Video Tutorials

Stop Manually Dragging Sliders Back to Zero — There's a Much Faster Way

There’s a particular kind of frustration that hits when you’re deep in an edit and you realize a whole section of adjustments has gone sideways. The Presence panel is a mess, your Tone sliders look like a seismograph readout, and you need to back everything out and start fresh. For a long time, my solution was to drag each slider back to zero by hand, one at a time, like some kind of monk doing penance.

Split Toning Is the Difference Between a Good Edit and a Memorable One
Color Grading

Split Toning Is the Difference Between a Good Edit and a Memorable One

I had a folder of band press shots sitting on my desktop for three days before I figured out what was wrong with them. The exposure was right. The white balance was dialed. The skin tones looked natural. And the photos were completely, aggressively boring. They looked like stock photos of musicians rather than actual musicians. It wasn’t until I added a warm amber to the shadows and a faint blue to the highlights that the whole thing clicked.

When the Sky Blows Out: A Practical Guide to Recovering Highlights in Lightroom
Video Tutorials

When the Sky Blows Out: A Practical Guide to Recovering Highlights in Lightroom

There’s a particular kind of heartbreak that happens when you come home from a shoot, pull up your RAW files, and realize the best frame of the day has a chunk of pure white where the sky used to be. No detail. No texture. Just a blank spot where your highlights burned straight through the sensor’s ceiling. I’ve been there more times than I want to admit, and for a long time my instinct was the same as everyone else’s: drag it to the trash and hope lightning strikes twice.

HSL in Lightroom: The Color Control Most Editors Treat Like a Mystery Box
Editing Tutorials

HSL in Lightroom: The Color Control Most Editors Treat Like a Mystery Box

I was editing a set of golden hour portraits last spring, and the skin tones looked like the subject had been standing inside a traffic cone. The overall white balance was fine. The exposure was good. But somewhere between the warm light and my heavy-handed orange push in the tone curve, everything had gone sideways in a very specific, very unflattering direction. The fix took about forty-five seconds once I opened the HSL panel.

Split Toning Is the Reason Your Photos Look Flat (And How to Fix It in 4 Steps)
Color Grading

Split Toning Is the Reason Your Photos Look Flat (And How to Fix It in 4 Steps)

A few years back I was editing press shots for my band. No budget, no photographer, just me with a Nikon and a free trial of Lightroom trying to make us look like we belonged on a festival poster. I kept cranking up the contrast and punching the saturation and wondering why every photo looked like it came out of a vending machine. Something was off, and I couldn’t name it.