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 [...]
Chromatic aberration sounds technical and beyond the grasp of most of us, but it's simply color fringing that some lenses create in our photos: It can be easily fixed by checking the "Remove Chromatic Aberration" checkbox in the Lens Corrections panel. Watch this short video for more about chromatic aberration, how to fix it, and how [...]
It's easy to create simple black, white or transparent photo borders in Lightroom, using the Effects panel in the Develop module. The Effects panel is on the right side, towards the bottom of your panels. Set the Style to Paint Overlay, so that highlights don't show through your border. 1. Black film-style border Set Amount to [...]
If you have upgraded to Lightroom 4, 5, 6 or CC from Lightroom 3 or earlier (even if you came via Lightroom 4), when you look at photos in the Develop module that came from Lightroom 3, you will see a lightning bolt below the histogram if the histogram is open, or to the left of the [...]
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 [...]
The Alt (PC) or Option (Mac) key reveals a lot of convenient additional functionality in most or all of Lightroom’s modules. The problem is, there is nothing on the screen to tell you where holding it down may reveal something useful. In this post I will list all of the Alt/Option functionality that I have found [...]
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 [...]