Workflow

Stop Drowning in Photos: How to Cull Your Lightroom Catalog Like a Pro
Video Tutorials

Stop Drowning in Photos: How to Cull Your Lightroom Catalog Like a Pro

Coming back from a shoot with 800 raw files is one of those problems that sounds like a good problem until you’re actually sitting in front of it at 11pm. I used to just start from the top and delete anything obviously bad, which meant I spent most of my energy on the garbage instead of the gold. It wasn’t until I started treating culling as its own deliberate phase of the workflow, completely separate from editing, that my output quality actually improved.

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.

Stop Losing Your Best Shots: How Nigel Danson's Lightroom Folder System Actually Works
Video Tutorials

Stop Losing Your Best Shots: How Nigel Danson's Lightroom Folder System Actually Works

There’s a specific kind of dread that hits when a client asks you to find “that misty lake shot from a couple years back” and you realize your Lightroom catalog is basically a digital junk drawer. I’ve been there. Folders named “new folder (3)” and dates that made sense at the time but mean nothing now. The whole catalog becomes a place you avoid instead of a tool you trust.

I Switched to a Wacom Tablet for Lightroom Editing and I'm Not Going Back
Video Tutorials

I Switched to a Wacom Tablet for Lightroom Editing and I'm Not Going Back

I’ve been editing photos in Lightroom long enough to have strong opinions about things most people don’t notice, like the exact amount of friction a scroll wheel should have, or why the brush tool with a mouse feels like trying to paint with a bar of soap. For years I told myself the mouse was fine. It’s fine. Everyone uses a mouse. Then I watched Thomas Heaton pick up a Wacom Intuos Pro tablet for the first time and start editing like he’d been born with a stylus in his hand, and I felt that specific kind of creative jealousy that means you need to change something.

Why Your Lightroom Photos Look Banded and Funky (And How to Fix It)
Video Tutorials

Why Your Lightroom Photos Look Banded and Funky (And How to Fix It)

I’ve been editing photos in Lightroom long enough to know that the application has a gift for making you doubt yourself at exactly the wrong moment. You’re culling a shoot, you land on a landscape with a gorgeous gradient sky, and suddenly the sky looks like a television losing signal - horizontal lines cutting through what should be smooth, clean tones. Your stomach drops. You start mentally calculating whether your camera sensor is dying or your monitor is going bad.

Why Lightroom Feels Slow When Browsing (And the Two-Step Fix That Actually Works)
Video Tutorials

Why Lightroom Feels Slow When Browsing (And the Two-Step Fix That Actually Works)

There’s a specific kind of frustration that hits when you’ve just come back from a shoot with 400 raw files and Lightroom turns every arrow key press into a three-second waiting game. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit. Early on, I thought it was just the price of shooting raw. You take the slow rendering as payment for the flexibility. Turns out, I was wrong. I was just using Lightroom in the worst possible way for browsing.

Why Your Lightroom Edits Look Incredible on Screen and Terrible Everywhere Else
Tutorials

Why Your Lightroom Edits Look Incredible on Screen and Terrible Everywhere Else

I sent a client gallery last spring and got a message back within ten minutes: “These look kind of gray and flat? Did something go wrong?” Nothing went wrong with my edit. Everything went wrong with my export. The rich, warm tones I’d spent an hour dialing in looked like they’d been photocopied twice and uploaded through a 2009 Wi-Fi connection. I’ve been editing in Lightroom for over a decade and I still had a moment where I stared at my screen wondering if I’d lost my mind.

Stop Rebuilding From Scratch: How to Actually Save and Reuse Lightroom Print Templates
Video Tutorials

Stop Rebuilding From Scratch: How to Actually Save and Reuse Lightroom Print Templates

There’s a specific kind of frustration that only photographers know: a client emails six months after their session asking for reprints, and you’re staring at a blank Print module wondering how you ever arranged those eleven photos in the first place. You remember it looked great. You do not remember which images, which order, or what sizes you used. I’ve rebuilt the same layout from scratch more times than I want to admit, usually while a perfectly good record was skipping in the background because I was too annoyed to flip it.

7 Lightroom Habits That Actually Stick (Broken Down From a Nigel Danson Tutorial)
Video Tutorials

7 Lightroom Habits That Actually Stick (Broken Down From a Nigel Danson Tutorial)

Every photographer eventually lands on a workflow they trust. Mine took longer than I’d like to admit. I learned Lightroom out of necessity - my band couldn’t afford a photographer, so someone had to figure out how to make our press shots look like we had our act together. That someone was me, armed with a cracked laptop and a lot of YouTube rabbit holes. Which is exactly why this Nigel Danson tutorial caught my attention.

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.

Stop Wasting Hours on Culling: Lightroom's AI Does It During Import Now
Video Tutorials

Stop Wasting Hours on Culling: Lightroom's AI Does It During Import Now

I used to lose entire afternoons to culling. Shoot a portrait session, come home, pour a drink, and then spend two hours clicking through near-identical frames trying to decide which version of someone blinking was less bad. It was the part of my workflow I dreaded most, and honestly the part I was worst at, because decision fatigue sets in fast and suddenly you’re keeping photos you have no business keeping.

Work Smarter in Lightroom: 8 Speed Tricks I Wish I Knew Earlier
Video Tutorials

Work Smarter in Lightroom: 8 Speed Tricks I Wish I Knew Earlier

There’s a specific kind of frustration that hits when you’re sitting in front of a catalog of 800 wedding photos and Lightroom is chugging along like it’s running on a calculator. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit. Over the years I’ve picked up habits that help, but a recent tutorial from Mango Street pulled together eight of the most practical speed techniques I’ve seen organized in one place, and a couple of them genuinely changed how I approach a heavy editing session.