Photo Editing

Lightroom From the Top: How Tony Northrup's Culling-First Workflow Will Change How You Edit
Video Tutorials

Lightroom From the Top: How Tony Northrup's Culling-First Workflow Will Change How You Edit

Every photographer I know has the same problem: a memory card full of 300+ shots from one session, a vague intention to “edit those later,” and a folder that never gets touched again. I fell into this exact trap when I was editing press photos for my band on zero budget, learning Lightroom by trial and error with no system whatsoever. The editing wasn’t the hard part. The chaos before the editing was.

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
Video Tutorials

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.

Lightroom's Masking Tools Are Smarter Than You Think — Here's How to Actually Use Them
Tutorials

Lightroom's Masking Tools Are Smarter Than You Think — Here's How to Actually Use Them

I was editing a portrait session last spring, rushing to get a gallery delivered before my copy of Rumours finished its second side, when I realized I’d been doing it wrong for years. Not wrong-wrong. Just inefficient. I was still painting adjustment brushes over skies by hand like it was 2015, carefully avoiding tree branches like I was defusing something. Then I clicked “Select Sky” in the Masking panel and watched Lightroom trace every pine needle in about four seconds.

Stop Noise From Ruining Your Wildlife and Nature Shots (A Lightroom Brush Technique Worth Knowing)
Video Tutorials

Stop Noise From Ruining Your Wildlife and Nature Shots (A Lightroom Brush Technique Worth Knowing)

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from nailing a wildlife shot, getting the exposure right, holding your breath long enough for the bird to turn its head just so, and then zooming in at your desk to find the background looks like a bowl of colored gravel. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit. Noisy backgrounds don’t just look bad on their own. They actively pull the viewer’s eye away from your subject, which is the one thing you actually cared about when you pressed the shutter.

Lightroom Web Is Better Than You Think — Here's What Adobe Just Added
Video Tutorials

Lightroom Web Is Better Than You Think — Here's What Adobe Just Added

I’ve been a Lightroom guy for a long time. Long enough that I have an embarrassingly large catalog, presets named after Wilco songs, and genuine opinions about tone curve shapes. But I’ll be honest with you: I had basically written off Lightroom web. I poked at it a couple of years ago, thought “that’s cute,” and went back to the desktop app. Big mistake. Katrin Eismann’s recent session for KelbyOne, filmed around Adobe Max, changed that.

Why Your Digital Photos Look Too Clean (And How Film Emulation Fixes It)
Color Grading

Why Your Digital Photos Look Too Clean (And How Film Emulation Fixes It)

The Problem With Perfectly Sharp Photos I was editing a batch of golden hour portraits last fall, technically perfect exposures, tack-sharp focus, clean shadows. And they looked completely lifeless. My client kept saying “they’re beautiful but something feels off,” which is the most frustrating sentence a photographer can hear because she wasn’t wrong. What she was picking up on, without knowing the vocabulary for it, is something I call the digital sterility problem.

The Contrast Method I Wish I'd Known Earlier (A Lightroom Breakdown Worth Your Time)
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The Contrast Method I Wish I'd Known Earlier (A Lightroom Breakdown Worth Your Time)

Contrast is one of those editing decisions that feels deceptively simple until you’re forty minutes into a session wondering why your image looks either muddy or crunchy and you’re not sure which slider made it worse. I’ve been editing in Lightroom long enough to have strong opinions about most things in this software, but contrast has always been the one area where I kept second-guessing myself. Too much and the photo looks like it was processed by someone who just discovered the Dehaze slider for the first time.

Range Masking in Lightroom: The One Feature That Makes Your Graduated Filters Actually Work
Video Tutorials

Range Masking in Lightroom: The One Feature That Makes Your Graduated Filters Actually Work

There’s a problem I run into constantly when editing landscape shots, and I’d bet you’ve hit it too. You’ve got a blown-out sky sitting on top of a beautifully exposed foreground, so you reach for Lightroom’s graduated filter, drag it down over the sky, pull the exposure back, and then stare at the result in quiet frustration. The filter doesn’t care about your mountain peak. It doesn’t care that your brightest cloud and your darkest ridge are sitting two inches apart.

How to Recover Blown-Out Skies in Lightroom (Without Making It Look Fake)
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How to Recover Blown-Out Skies in Lightroom (Without Making It Look Fake)

There’s a particular kind of frustration that comes with reviewing a shoot and realizing the sky is completely blown out. The subject looks great, the light on their face is perfect, and the sky is just… white. Nothing. A void. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit, and for a while my solution was to either swap the sky entirely or just crop it out and pretend it never existed.

How to Build a Photo Calendar Inside Lightroom's Print Module (No InDesign Required)
Video Tutorials

How to Build a Photo Calendar Inside Lightroom's Print Module (No InDesign Required)

Every December I get at least three messages from photographers asking how to make a photo calendar as a client gift without paying for a web service that slaps its own logo on the back. I used to shrug and say “InDesign, probably.” Then I watched this KelbyOne tutorial and felt a little embarrassed that I hadn’t thought of the solution myself. Watch the full tutorial on YouTube before or after reading this, because the presenter moves fast and having this breakdown alongside it will save you some rewinds.

How to Nail the Vintage Tumblr Look in Lightroom: A Brandon Woelfel-Inspired Breakdown
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How to Nail the Vintage Tumblr Look in Lightroom: A Brandon Woelfel-Inspired Breakdown

There’s a specific kind of photo that stopped me mid-scroll for years before I understood how it was made. Dusty highlights, a faint blue-pink cast, colors that feel like they were recovered from a roll of film left in someone’s glove compartment. It’s the aesthetic that defined a certain era of Tumblr photography, and Brandon Woelfel made it his signature. The problem was I could see it, but I couldn’t reverse-engineer it on my own.