Presets

Lightroom's Adaptive Presets Finally Made Me a Preset Person (And I've Been Resisting for Years)
Video Tutorials

Lightroom's Adaptive Presets Finally Made Me a Preset Person (And I've Been Resisting for Years)

There’s a version of me from about two years ago who would have rolled his eyes at presets. Hard. I named my own presets after Wilco songs and built every mask by hand because I believed that was the only honest way to edit a photo. Then I watched Thomas Heaton — a landscape photographer I respect precisely because he’s methodical and unsentimental about gear and software — admit on camera that he’d been running an outdated version of Lightroom for so long that he used it during a paid Adobe presentation.

Lightroom Mobile Editing From Scratch: What Mango Street Gets Right (And How to Actually Use It)
Video Tutorials

Lightroom Mobile Editing From Scratch: What Mango Street Gets Right (And How to Actually Use It)

Most of my serious editing still happens at a desk with a cup of coffee and a Fleetwood Mac record spinning in the background. But client work doesn’t wait for ideal conditions, and I’ve had to get comfortable finishing edits on my phone more times than I’d like to admit. The problem is that most “mobile editing” tutorials treat Lightroom Mobile like a toy version of the real thing, full of vague gestures and zero actual settings.

Split Toning Is the Difference Between a Good Photo and One People Actually Stop Scrolling For
Color Grading

Split Toning Is the Difference Between a Good Photo and One People Actually Stop Scrolling For

I have a preset I made three years ago called “Rumble.” It’s named after a Link Wray track, which is exactly the kind of thing I do. It lives in a folder on my hard drive with about 200 other presets I’ve built over the years, and it gets applied to more portrait sessions than anything else I’ve made. The secret ingredient, the thing that makes it feel warm and slightly cinematic without looking like an Instagram filter from 2013, is split toning.

Lightroom Classic 7.5 Just Fixed Three Things That Were Driving Me Crazy
Video Tutorials

Lightroom Classic 7.5 Just Fixed Three Things That Were Driving Me Crazy

Every time Adobe drops a Lightroom update, I do the same thing. I open the release notes, skim past the “performance improvements,” and hunt for anything that actually changes how I work. Most updates are quiet. Version 7.5, which Adobe pushed out in the third week of August 2018, is not one of those quiet updates. It’s got three specific changes that solve problems I’ve been working around for months.

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)

I’ve watched the same thing happen to photographers at every skill level. They buy a preset pack, drop one onto a photo, and the result looks like a completely different product than the thumbnail they paid for. The highlights are blown. The colors are muddy. The mood that sold them on the purchase is nowhere. So they blame the presets, delete the pack, and go back to editing from scratch. Nine times out of ten, the presets weren’t the problem.

Your Phone Is a Darkroom: How to Actually Edit in Lightroom Mobile Without Losing Your Mind
Mobile Editing

Your Phone Is a Darkroom: How to Actually Edit in Lightroom Mobile Without Losing Your Mind

Last spring I was sitting in a green room in East Nashville, forty minutes before a show, with sixty raw files from a shoot that needed to be delivered by morning. My laptop was at home. My phone was in my pocket. And Lightroom Mobile, which I’d been treating like a toy for two years, suddenly needed to be my entire post-production pipeline. It worked. Not because mobile editing is magic, but because I finally understood what the app is actually built to do.

Camera-Specific Defaults and Sync FAQ: What Actually Changed in Lightroom Classic 9.2
Video Tutorials

Camera-Specific Defaults and Sync FAQ: What Actually Changed in Lightroom Classic 9.2

Every time Adobe drops an update, I do the same thing: open the release notes, skim for anything that affects my actual workflow, and ignore the rest. Most updates are minor. But the February 2020 update to Lightroom Classic was one I kept coming back to, because it quietly fixed something that had been annoying me for years. I shoot with two different Sony bodies depending on the job, and getting each one to open with sensible default settings has always involved too many steps and too much memory for what those steps even were.

How to Edit 500 Photos in the Time It Usually Takes You to Edit 20
Workflow & Efficiency

How to Edit 500 Photos in the Time It Usually Takes You to Edit 20

Last spring I agreed to cover a friend’s wedding as a favor. Not as the photographer, just as a backup shooter with a mirrorless camera and a wide-angle lens. Three hours later I had 600 raw files, a headache, and a very clear reminder of why I stopped shooting events. The editing wasn’t the problem. The volume was. And if you’ve ever come home from a shoot, opened Lightroom, and felt your stomach drop at the number in the bottom corner of your catalog, you know exactly what I mean.

Update Your Lightroom Copyright Metadata Before You Import Another Photo in 2025
Video Tutorials

Update Your Lightroom Copyright Metadata Before You Import Another Photo in 2025

Every January I do the same thing: I spend way too long organizing my preset folders, rethinking my export settings, and completely forgetting the one administrative task that actually matters legally. I blow past the new year and import hundreds of photos before I realize my copyright metadata still reads the previous year. It’s not a disaster, but it’s also not nothing. Copyright information embedded in your files is your first line of defense if an image gets scraped, stolen, or published without permission.

Lightroom 8.1 Just Let You Rearrange Everything — Here's What Actually Changed
Video Tutorials

Lightroom 8.1 Just Let You Rearrange Everything — Here's What Actually Changed

Every few months I find myself doing a version of the same ritual: a Lightroom update drops, I install it, and then I spend twenty minutes clicking around the Develop module trying to figure out what changed. Adobe is not exactly famous for dramatic release notes. The December 2018 update to Lightroom Classic CC - version 8.1 - was one of those quiet ones that turned out to matter more than the changelog suggested.

Lightroom Won't Auto-Watermark by Year — But Here's the Workaround That Actually Works
Video Tutorials

Lightroom Won't Auto-Watermark by Year — But Here's the Workaround That Actually Works

Every few months I get a version of the same question: “Can Lightroom automatically put the year a photo was taken into the watermark when I export?” It sounds like such a reasonable ask. You’ve got thousands of images from multiple years, you want that copyright line to be accurate, and surely Lightroom – the software with all that beautiful metadata baked in – can just… connect those dots automatically.

Your Phone Is a Darkroom: How to Actually Edit Photos in Lightroom Mobile Without Losing Your Mind
Mobile Editing

Your Phone Is a Darkroom: How to Actually Edit Photos in Lightroom Mobile Without Losing Your Mind

I was sitting at a coffee shop in East Nashville last spring, waiting on a friend, when I noticed I had 47 unedited photos from a shoot sitting in my camera roll. My laptop was at home. The shoot was for a client who needed selects by end of day. So I opened Lightroom Mobile, synced the raw files through Creative Cloud, and edited the whole batch on my phone in about 40 minutes.