Love it or hate it, Adobe Lightroom has become one of the most popular post-processing and image management tools on the market. With its simple and intuitive interface, it is easy to learn and our team at Photography Life has provided many in-depth articles on using specific Lightroom features over the years. However, one of the biggest frustrations with Lightroom can be its poor performance, which can be especially disappointing when using the software on an older computer. In this…
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How to Simulate the Orton Effect in Lightroom
In my last article on photographing winter landscapes article, I tried to list a few useful tips for capturing the beauty of a winter landscape. Since I promised to elaborate more on my post-processing technique later on, I would like to do that in this article. To get the unique look of some photos, I use a “negative clarity” method that emulates the very well-known Orton effect. For the classical Orton effect, Adobe Photoshop or any other software with layer…
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How to Upgrade Lightroom
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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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How to Use the Graduated Filter in Lightroom
Have you ever wondered how to use the graduated filter in Lightroom in order to help balance out your images and help recover more information? In this article, I will share some detail about the specifics of the graduated filter and show everything you need to know about using this valuable tool in a concise, step by step video. If you are just starting out in Lightroom, this will be a good introduction on using the graduated filter, which keyboard…
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How to Use the Adjustment Brush in Lightroom
Have you ever wondered how to use the adjustment brush in Lightroom? Although we have covered the use of different tools within Lightroom in different articles, 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 using the adjustment brush, which keyboard shortcuts to use to access it, and how to do basic…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Using Content-Aware Fill Non-Destructively in Photoshop
A strength of Photoshop is being able to perform edits non-destructively. Most edits can be performed on their own layer, preserving the original background layer. The Spot Healing Brush, Clone Stamp, and Patch tools all work this way and they can all be used to remove unwanted objects non-destructively. However, if you have ever tried to remove an object from an image using Content-Aware Fill, you will have noticed that you can’t do this on a new blank layer. This…
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Lightroom Import Settings
The Lightroom import dialog is one of the most essential components of the software, not just because that’s how one gets images into Lightroom, but also because with the proper use of the import dialog, it is possible to properly organize images and apply specific presets that can potentially save quite a bit of time when post-processing images. In this article, I will go over the import dialog and cover its settings to hopefully help our readers in understanding its…
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5 Simple Lightroom Tips You Might Not Know About
Adobe Lightroom is arguably the most widely-used image editing software around these days. While most of our readers are probably quite familiar with it, a piece of software as complex as Lightroom is sure to have some tricks and features that not everyone knows about. What I’d like to do today is share a few of those with you. If some of these are new to you, enjoy having some new tricks up your sleeve! If these are old news…
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Lightroom 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and CC Performance Comparison
Ever since I started using Lightroom back in 2007, I have been keeping a backup of every single version on my computer, making sure that I had the latest version of that particular release. With the very first version of Lightroom having a few issues and not having 64-bit architecture support, I ended up deleting it, so the first release of Lightroom I actually preserved was Lightroom 2 (the latest build of that release was Lightroom 2.7). The next stable…
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Editing For Your Audience
One of the things that always tends to surprise me is how differently I edit images that were taken with my phone versus images that were taken with my DSLR. Of course, there are obvious differences between the equipment used, the editing software that is available and the overall quality of the final image, but after giving it some thought, I realized that this isn’t why I edit images differently depending on what was used to capture an image. It…
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Adding A Splash Of Color With Your Post-Processing Tools
Most of you are probably already familiar with the different tools that are available to use while editing your images in post-processing software. I’m referring to the various brushes and filters that can be found in Lightroom, Capture One Pro and other similar programs. Well, did you know that in addition to using these tools to adjust things like exposure and saturation, you can also use them to add a bit of color to your images? In this post I’ll…
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How to Fix Lens Distortion
Lens distortion is a common issue we photographers deal with on a daily basis. It can be split into two groups – distortion by perspective and distortion by optics. Be it one or the other, it often causes unnatural-looking deformation of photos we take. As a result, we end up searching for ways to address distortion issues in the field, or afterwards in post-production. Usually lenses with longer focal lengths produce less distorted results than wide-angle lenses. And as you…
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A Few Different Ways to Adjust Image Brightness
A good looking image consists of many different things, most of which are subjective. In this article I want to briefly discuss one specific variable, which is image brightness. While I don’t plan on going into much detail and getting very technical, I do want to show you how you can adjust image brightness and the final look of your image using a few different methods in your post processing software. Although I’m using Lightroom, the method and concept should…
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