If you want to experiment with different versions of develop work on a photo, virtual copies and/or snapshots are two great ways to do this -- all without having to create a second file on your hard drive. Snapshots allow you to save your work at different points in time so that you can easily [...]
I get a fair number of emails from frantic users who have lost some critical part of the Lightroom interface. In this video I show you how to find missing panels, tools, and more. Watch the video to learn not only how to find what you have lost, but also how to hide what you don't [...]
Note: this article and video were created when Lightroom 5 came out, but they are applicable to Lightroom 6, CC 2015 and Classic CC. Lightroom smart previews allow you to develop your photos, even when the masters are offline. Imagine traveling with your laptop, and leaving your big heavy external hard drive with all your [...]
Upright is a new automatic feature for straightening photos and correcting perspective. In the video below I show you how to use Upright and how it interacts with the Crop tool. I also introduce the new grids and guides available in both the Library and Develop modules of the Lightroom 5 Beta. [UPDATE: This tutorial is [...]
The Radial Filter tool in Lightroom 5 (and now 6 and CC) is great for making local changes to your photo that affect either the outside or inside of an oval or circular area -- a classic example is creating a vignette effect to darken the edges of your photo and to bring attention to the center. [...]
Watch my video tutorial below for how to use all of the new features in the Spot Removal tool in the Lightroom 5 beta — including the new advanced healing brush with which you can click and drag to define a non-circular area andwhich is great for both removing objects and doing retouching, and for the [...]
Do you want your skies bluer, faces less red, or other colors in your photo more or less intense or lighter or darker? In Lightroom this sometimes requires painting with the adjustment brush, but it often can be accomplished much more quickly with Lightroom's HSL/Color panel. In this video tutorial from my Lightroom 4: The Fundamentals [...]
If you want to add text or a graphic to your photos, use Lightroom's watermarking functionality. This is available when you export copies of your photos, and when you create output in the Print, Slideshow and Web modules. (You can't watermark your master photos.) Below is a video tutorial on using the watermark editor to create, save [...]
My favorite layout style in Lightroom's Print module is the Custom Package, which allows us to layout multiple photos on the page. These can be laid out on top of each other, they can overlap, text can be added, etc.. Here are a couple examples -- a tryptic that I designed to print, and a collage [...]
In this video tutorial, I give you an overview of Lightroom's output modules, to give you an idea of what you can do with each. This is video #2 in my 12 hour series of 55 videos, Lightroom 4: Producing Great Output (A Workshop on Video) , available on DVD or by download. (UPDATE: Here's the [...]
As I have written before, I find myself still discovering cool hidden features of Lightroom. This one I picked up from Sean McCormack's new Craft & Vision e-book, Essential Development (which as I wrote in my last post, you should definitely check out). The traditional way to set the size of the spot removal circle is [...]
UPDATE June, 2017: While this video was made using Lightroom 4, it is also applicable to newer versions. In this video, I develop a photo to show you my workflow and how I decide what edits to do, and to demonstrate many of Lightroom's Develop module editing tools. This video is part of my Lightroom 4 [...]