Photo Editing

How to Fake a 35mm Film Look in Lightroom Using a Masked Gradient (Peter McKinnon's Best Trick)
Video Tutorials

How to Fake a 35mm Film Look in Lightroom Using a Masked Gradient (Peter McKinnon's Best Trick)

There’s a specific problem I kept running into with digital photos that were supposed to feel vintage. I’d pile on the grain, drop the contrast, pull back the clarity, and the result still looked like a digital photo wearing a Halloween costume. Something was off. The scene felt sharp in a way that film never is, too evenly exposed, too present. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to figure out what was missing, and honestly, the answer was sitting in a Lightroom panel I was already using for other things.

Fix a Flat, Boring Photo in Lightroom: Scott Kelby's Intermediate Workflow, Step by Step
Video Tutorials

Fix a Flat, Boring Photo in Lightroom: Scott Kelby's Intermediate Workflow, Step by Step

There’s a specific kind of photo I used to dread editing. Not a disaster shot, not a total throwaway, but the mediocre middle-ground image. Flat light, a blown highlight somewhere it shouldn’t be, colors that look like they were processed through a wet sock. The kind of file where you open it in Lightroom, stare at it for thirty seconds, and then go make coffee instead. I’ve got a whole folder of those from the early years, back when I was editing press photos for my band because nobody else was going to do it.

Lightroom (Not Classic) Finally Does What Bridge Never Could — Here's What Changed
Video Tutorials

Lightroom (Not Classic) Finally Does What Bridge Never Could — Here's What Changed

I’ll be honest with you. For years I told anyone who asked that Lightroom Classic was the only serious option. The newer Lightroom, the one Adobe just calls “Lightroom,” felt like a stripped-down cloud toy built for people who edit on iPads. I had strong feelings about this. I still have strong feelings about a lot of things in this industry. But a recent tutorial by Matt Kloskowski shifted my thinking on at least a few of those points, and when something changes my mind, I figure it’s worth writing about.

Black & White Done Right: The Lightroom Color Mix Method Most People Skip
Video Tutorials

Black & White Done Right: The Lightroom Color Mix Method Most People Skip

Black and white photography has a reputation problem. People treat it like a filter you slap on when a color photo isn’t working, a last resort rather than a deliberate creative decision. I used to do the same thing. Early on, my go-to move was dragging Saturation to zero and calling it a day, which produced flat, lifeless images that looked less like art and more like a printer running out of ink.

The Tone Curve Isn't a Mystery — You're Just Using It Wrong
Editing Techniques

The Tone Curve Isn't a Mystery — You're Just Using It Wrong

I spent the first two years of my Lightroom life completely ignoring the tone curve. I’d drag the Basic panel sliders around until the photo looked okay, then close the develop module and tell myself I was done. The curve panel was just sitting there, that little graph with the diagonal line, looking complicated and vaguely threatening. I figured it was for professionals. Then I shot a set of live music photos in a venue with genuinely awful lighting, and no combination of Exposure, Highlights, and Shadows was saving them.

How Lightroom's Tone Curve Actually Works (And Why It's Not as Scary as It Looks)
Video Tutorials

How Lightroom's Tone Curve Actually Works (And Why It's Not as Scary as It Looks)

Every time I open a new editing session, the tone curve is one of the first panels I reach for. Not because it’s flashy, but because it gives me a level of control over light and contrast that the basic sliders just can’t replicate. That said, I’ve watched plenty of photographers drag a point around the curve, squint at the result, and then hit undo because they had no idea what they’d actually done.

Lightroom's Radial Mask Tool Is the Closest Thing to a Darkroom Spotlight (Here's How to Use It)
Video Tutorials

Lightroom's Radial Mask Tool Is the Closest Thing to a Darkroom Spotlight (Here's How to Use It)

There’s a specific frustration I run into on almost every edit, and it took me longer than I’d like to admit to find the right fix. The photo is technically fine. Exposure is decent. Composition is solid. But it looks flat. Nothing pulls the eye where it’s supposed to go. The subject is sitting in the frame competing with everything around it on equal footing, and the whole image feels like a shrug.

The Cinema Look in Lightroom: A Step-by-Step Breakdown That Actually Makes Sense
Video Tutorials

The Cinema Look in Lightroom: A Step-by-Step Breakdown That Actually Makes Sense

Every photographer hits a wall at some point where their images look technically correct but emotionally flat. Sharp, well-exposed, properly white-balanced – and somehow completely lifeless. That gap between a clean photo and a cinematic photo is something I spent a long time trying to close before I started really pulling apart tutorials from people who had already solved the problem. In this Kelvin Designs tutorial, Kelvin walks through how to build the cinema look from scratch in Lightroom, working through both a portrait and a landscape.

Split-Tone Any Photo in Photoshop Using Fill Layers (It's Faster Than You Think)
Video Tutorials

Split-Tone Any Photo in Photoshop Using Fill Layers (It's Faster Than You Think)

Most of my color work happens in Lightroom. That’s my home turf. But every so often a technique shows up in Photoshop that’s so clean, so flexible, that I have to stop and pay attention. This is one of those techniques. In this Aaron Nace (PHLEARN) tutorial, the concept is deceptively simple: drop a solid color fill layer on your image, change the blend mode, and suddenly you’re color grading like you’ve been doing it for years.

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)

I was editing press shots for my band late one night, somewhere around 1 a.m., when I realized the photos looked like a dental office brochure. Sharp. Bright. Perfectly exposed. Completely soulless. We’d rented a decent venue, worn the right clothes, and the lighting had actually cooperated for once. But something about the RAW files from my Canon R6 made us look like stock photo models instead of a real band with real gigs.

Shadow Recovery Is Killing Your Photos (Here's How to Fix the Noise It Creates)
Video Tutorials

Shadow Recovery Is Killing Your Photos (Here's How to Fix the Noise It Creates)

There’s a trade-off nobody warns you about when you first start editing in Lightroom. You shoot something in low light, you get it into the Develop module, and you drag those shadows up to rescue all that beautiful detail you knew was hiding in the dark. The image opens up. You feel like a genius. Then you zoom in and see it: grain. Speckles. A texture that looks less like film and more like your sensor had a bad night.

HSL in Lightroom: The Adjustment Most Editors Use Wrong (And How to Fix That)
Color Grading

HSL in Lightroom: The Adjustment Most Editors Use Wrong (And How to Fix That)

I was editing a portrait last fall and something was bothering me about the skin tones. The overall exposure was solid, the white balance was dialed in, but the subject looked vaguely radioactive. That particular shade of orange that creeps into skin when you push a warm preset too hard. My first instinct, the instinct every beginner has, was to reach for the Temperature slider and walk it back. That would have fixed the skin and wrecked everything else in the frame.