RAW Editing

How to Pull a Usable Image Out of an Underexposed RAW File in Lightroom
Video Tutorials

How to Pull a Usable Image Out of an Underexposed RAW File in Lightroom

We’ve all been there. You’re out shooting, the light is doing something genuinely magical, you fire off the shot, and then you look at the back of the camera and feel your stomach drop. The exposure is off. Two stops under, maybe more. The moment is gone and you’re left with a dark, flat file that looks like it belongs in the trash. I used to think those shots were just losses.

Stitching the Sky: A Practical Guide to Building Panoramas Inside Lightroom
Video Tutorials

Stitching the Sky: A Practical Guide to Building Panoramas Inside Lightroom

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from shooting a killer landscape, knowing you captured something real out there, and then opening your files to find that no single frame holds the whole scene. I’ve been there more times than I want to count. Wide-angle lenses help, but they also introduce distortion that can make a beautiful horizon look like it’s bending toward you. The smarter solution, the one working photographers have been using for years, is shooting a sequence of overlapping frames and stitching them into a panorama.

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.

What Lightroom Presets Actually Do to Your Files (And Why Most People Use Them Wrong)
Lightroom Editing

What Lightroom Presets Actually Do to Your Files (And Why Most People Use Them Wrong)

A few years ago I released a preset pack on a Tuesday night, mostly because I’d spent the entire weekend building it and felt too stubborn to let it sit on my hard drive. I named every preset after a song, priced the pack at zero dollars, and went to bed. By Friday it had 50,000 downloads. The number wasn’t the surprising part. The surprising part was how many people emailed me to say the presets “weren’t working” because their photos looked nothing like the preview images on the download page.

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.

Your Phone Is a Darkroom: How to Actually Color Grade in Lightroom Mobile Without Ruining Your Files
Mobile Editing

Your Phone Is a Darkroom: How to Actually Color Grade in Lightroom Mobile Without Ruining Your Files

Last month I was sitting in a coffee shop in East Nashville, waiting on a client to send over a shoot location change, when I got a message from a photographer asking why her Lightroom Mobile edits always looked “off” compared to her desktop work. She’d sent me a screenshot. The skin tones were orange, the shadows were crushed, and the overall look had that telltale flat-but-too-saturated thing that happens when people treat Lightroom Mobile like Instagram.

DaVinci Resolve 21's New Photo Editing Suite Is Shaking Up the Lightroom Ecosystem
News

DaVinci Resolve 21's New Photo Editing Suite Is Shaking Up the Lightroom Ecosystem

DaVinci Resolve 21’s New Photo Editing Suite Is Shaking Up the Lightroom Ecosystem When Blackmagic Design dropped DaVinci Resolve 21 this week, I’ll admit my first thought was: “Wait, isn’t that the video editing software?” Turns out, the company had other plans. Buried inside this massive update is something that could genuinely reshape how photographers think about their editing workflow—an entirely new Photo page that brings professional-grade color grading and RAW editing to Resolve’s already impressive toolset.