One great thing about the Lightroom Library is the amount of information that you can see just by glancing at your image files. From flag status, stack placement, virtual-copy…-ness, it’s all right there on top of the little file preview. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, fire up Lightroom. Make sure you’re [...]

This episode of @lightroomtips - the blog version features a graphical tutorial about how to customize the interface of Lightroom. This is more of a fun tip than a useful one - but there's nothing that says Lightroom needs to be all business! I'm using Lightroom 2 below - the process may be different (or limited) in Lightroom 1. One of the nice things about Lightroom is that Adobe has built into the program the ability to customize the look of the workspace, right down to the logo that appears at the top.

This episode of @lightroomtips - the blog version features a video tutorial about how to use the Quick Collection feature in Lightroom.

Hello everyone, and welcome to the first full-blog edition of Lightroom Tip of the Day. I hope to do a full blog edition once every week, typically on Thursday. For my old readers, welcome back. Lightroom is a photo organization and editing software produced by Adobe systems (you know, the guys who do Photoshop?). Over the past two years, it has taken the photography world by storm. I've used Lightroom since it was first released, and find that as the program gets more sophisticated, I am going to photoshop less and less for photo editing. Lightroom is a fantastic RAW editor - the nondestructive editing properties mean that I can revisit and re-edit a photo even after making significant changes - I can even export the photo, decide I want a brand new look, and reset the image to the import settings and start again, all with a few clicks of the mouse. Lightroom Tip of the Day is a Twitter account I have created to give photographers one Lightroom tip every (week)day. The twitter account is @lightroomtips. Today's tip is : Rename presets can help you save time when renaming images. Interested? Read more below.

I was asked on Twitter today about Lightroom, how to get started and how the workflow goes – memory card -> hard drive -> Lightroom Library and Develop -> backup.  I thought I’d make a quick tutorial about one way to accomplish a basic workflow in Lightroom. First, start out with an empty catalog.  Save your [...]

Ok, so one thing I always enjoy seeing is how people bring their photos from SOOC (straight out of camera) to the final product. Typically, the most awesome end photos are awesome already SOOC, but I’ve seen amazing artists do amazing thing with ill-lit or otherwise flawed material.

I haven’t reached the point where I can save a badly lit photo, but I thought I would share with you my current process for editing a photo.

The first photo is “SOOC” – I shoot in RAW so technically this is straight from RAW… but close enough. RAW allows for more flexibility in editing, so I try to always shoot in RAW; however, there is some altering of the photo in the processing to JPG that is inherent in RAW. At least, I think there is.

Top left photo is the SOOC+crop – this step comes first, typically, and then tweaked before export. For headshots, I grab every photo in lightroom and adjust the aspect ratio to 8×10 before I do anything else. Then, I’ll go through and individually edit each photo’s crop and straightning.

Top right photo is SOOC+crop+lightroom adjustments. This varys wildly depending on the photo. I either use my own tweaking or I’ll use a preset and go from there. For this photo I used a preset and tweaked from there.

The bottom two photos are after final photoshop tweaking. Sharpening the eyes, dodge the eye whites, brush out stray hairs, tweak the levels, and then convert to b/w for a b/w version (I use a setting for this, because I am lazy and the person who made the setting is amazingly talented and really, I don’t need to reinvent the wheel).

So, that’s kind of how I go through processing a photo. Not every photo makes it to the photoshop step; not every photo even makes it to the cropping step. But for all my final photos, this is pretty much the process.