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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Photoshop Layers and Layer Masking for Beginners
Arguably the most versatile adjustments in Photoshop are the layering and masking tools. Together, layers and masks make up a large portion of the work most photographers do in Photoshop, both for subtle and complex edits. However, if you are just beginning to work in Photoshop, these two irreplaceable tools may not be completely intuitive. In this article, I will cover the basics of using layers in Photoshop and discuss layer masking – laying the groundwork for far more advanced…
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Best Non-Destructive Editing Software for Photography
With so many editing / post-processing software packages on the market today, photographers might find it rather difficult to go through them all and compare key features in order to pick something that would ultimately work for their needs. Many of us go through that stage, especially when starting out. What is the best software for photo editing? What features does it have? Is it easy to learn and how much does it cost? These are just some of the…
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Advanced Post-Processing Tips: Three-Step Sharpening
Sharpening remains a particularly confusing topic among photographers, especially given the tremendous number of post-processing options available. Some post-processing software has so many options that it is hard to know where to start; others do not let you use optimal methods in the first place. If you are trying to use the best sharpening settings – including the lowest possible levels of noise and other artifacts – the ideal method is three-step sharpening.
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Google’s Nik Software is now FREE!
The title of the article deserves three exclamation marks, because this is one of the best news I have seen in photographic history! Google has just announced that it has made the best plugins for Photoshop and Lightroom, bundled into a single “Google’s Nik Collection” absolutely free (it was priced at $150 per license before). This is awesome, and no, it is not an April 1st Fool’s Day joke! As of today, March 24th 2016, you can download Google’s Nik…
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How to Avoid Duplicate File Names
Your earliest photographic habits naturally will build over time, including the ways that you name and organize your images. What seems like a small issue at first – say, keeping your camera’s default file names – could spiral out of control when you have tens of thousands of images. It can be easy to delete photographs on accident when they have the same file name, potentially deleting some of your favorite photos. Although a good backup system helps you recover a photo…
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Four Hidden Lightroom Features
Adobe Lightroom is a complex piece of software, and it includes countless features that are buried beneath the surface. In this article, I will cover four useful Develop options that aren’t obvious at first glance, ranging from precision cropping to local color adjustments. If you are a Lightroom guru, you certainly may use each of these already; however, for most Lightroom users, these features are somewhat difficult to find.
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