With each new release, Lightroom requires specific changes to the database, also known as a “catalog”, that must be carried out in an upgrade process before the newer version of the software can be used. While the process of upgrading the actual software is pretty straightforward, there are some important steps one needs to take to make sure that the Lightroom catalogs are upgraded successfully. If you are scared about upgrading and have not done it in the past, this guide might assist you in this process. The good news is, Adobe allows keeping both the newer and the older versions of Lightroom on the same machine, which means that you can continue to use your old Lightroom catalog if anything goes wrong. Once you are fully satisfied with the upgrade, you can then remove the old version of Lightroom, along with the old versions of catalogs. In this article, I will guide you through the process of upgrading Lightroom to the latest version.
How to Use the Spot Removal Tool in Lightroom (Video)
Have you ever wondered how to use the spot removal tool in Lightroom? Although we have covered it in depth in our Workflow and Post-Processing course, I thought it would be a good idea to share some detail about the specifics of the spot removal tool in a video. If you are just starting out in Lightroom, this will be a good introduction on how to use the spot removal tool, which keyboard shortcuts to use to access it and how to do basic customizations to make the tool fit your needs.
How to Create a Lightroom Snapshot (Video)
If you find yourself editing photos but have a hard time deciding between different looks for a particular image, creating a snapshot in Lightroom is a great way to quickly switch between different image edits. Additionally, snapshots are also a great way to preserve a particular image edit even if you decide to completely change an image. Many people don’t know how to create a snapshot in Lightroom or even know that the feature exists, so I created a video to give you an idea of what they’re all about.
How to Use the Radial Filter in Lightroom (Video)
Have you ever wondered how to use the radial filter in Lightroom? Although we have covered it in depth in our Workflow and Post-Processing course, I thought it would be a good idea to share some detail about the specifics of the radial filter in a video. If you are just starting out in Lightroom, this will be a good introduction on how to use the radial filter, which keyboard shortcuts to use to access it and how to do basic customizations to make the tool fit your needs.
How to Use the Graduated Filter in Lightroom (Video)
Have you ever wondered how to use the graduated filter in Lightroom? Although we have covered it in depth in our Workflow and Post-Processing course, I thought it would be a good idea to share some detail about the specifics of the graduated filter in a video. If you are just starting out in Lightroom, this will be a good introduction on how to use the graduated filter, which keyboard shortcuts to use to access it and how to do basic customizations to make the tool fit your needs.
How to Use the Adjustment Brush in Lightroom (Video)
Have you ever wondered how to use the adjustment brush in Lightroom? Although we have covered it in depth in our Workflow and Post-Processing course, I thought it would be a good idea to share some detail about the specifics of the adjustment brush in a video. If you are just starting out in Lightroom, this will be a good introduction on how to use the adjustment brush, which keyboard shortcuts to use to access it and how to do basic customizations to make the tool fit your needs.
How to Create a Lightroom Develop Preset
One of the features of Lightroom that I use the most often and has probably saved me more time than any other step in my editing process is creating and using develop presets. A develop preset is simply a group of adjustments that all get applied to an image at the same time. By default, Lightroom includes a variety of presets, but you can also create your own if you want something more personalized. In this post I’ll show you the process of creating a Lightroom develop preset, as well as how to modify an existing develop preset.
How to Make Sharp Watermarks in Lightroom
One of the biggest frustrations with Lightroom’s built-in watermarking tool, is the fact that it often ends up making watermarks appear too soft / blurry, especially when extracting smaller JPEG images. This happens due to Lightroom’s rather poor implementation of watermarking on images. Not only does Lightroom seem to apply sharpening to images before adding a watermark, but also, the resizing algorithm used by the software appears to be pretty bad. No matter what image dimensions one chooses, Adobe has not provided a way to turn off scaling in Watermark Editor, even if one provides transparent PNG / GIF images with the correct dimensions. For this reason, many photographers end up using Photoshop for adding watermarks to images, which certainly does take more time and effort, but certainly delivers much sharper results in comparison. After seeing poor watermarking results, I decided to look into alternative methods to see if there is a way to make watermarks sharper using the same tools. After some experimentation, I came up with two methods that ended up working well and that’s what I am going to share with our readers in this article.
How to Watermark Images in Lightroom
While it seems that adding watermarks to images does little nowadays to deter image theft, watermarks can still be very useful for photographers and business owners for promoting their work and their brands across websites and social media. Unfortunately, for those who are just starting out, adding a simple watermark to images can be a rather painful experience, especially if they are not already familiar with the process using such software tools as Photoshop. Thankfully, Adobe has made it easy to add watermarks to images in Lightroom, allowing one to not only add a watermark to a single image, but also to apply it to all images during the export process, which can save a lot of time and frustration when dealing with batches of images. In this article, I will show how to use the built-in watermark tool that is readily available in Lightroom in order to quickly add watermarks to images.
Integrating JPEGmini Pro to Lightroom Workflow
Although we have already published a detailed review of the JPEGmini Pro software a while ago, a number of readers have reached out to me, asking how to effectively use the software, specifically when extracting images for clients from Lightroom. I have now been using JPEGmini for over a year and both Lola and I have been extracting images from Lightroom in a specific way to get the highest quality JPEG images to our clients, while retaining the smallest file size possible. Previously, we would extract everything at particular resolutions (typically 2048 for smaller JPEGs and full size for print) using 100% JPEG compression for the full sized images for the best possible quality, but extracting hundreds and sometimes even thousands of images turned out to be a headache when it came to storage and file transmission. With JPEGmini, we were able to continue delivering the best images to our clients, with a much smaller footprint. This resulted in both time and cost savings in the long run for us, as we did not have to deal with time-consuming uploads and large USB drives. In this article, I will show how both Lola and I we have been utilizing JPEGmini as part of our Lightroom workflow.