Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
All in Lightroom
I was recently visiting a somewhat famous waterfall not too far from where I live and of course I took some photos while I was there. We went primarily to enjoy the fresh air and scenery, so it wasn’t a specific photo shoot, but even so I got some interesting images. One worked out particularly well, and I thought my process for editing it would make an interesting video, so here it is!
A good while ago now, I posted some photos of a dramatic seascape that I had taken of Dublin bay in the aftermath of a storm. A few people had asked me how I created the dramatic black and white look, and so I thought it would make a good video. I had used a combination of Lightroom and Nik Silver Efex for the processing and in the video I walk you through the process.
When you import ProRAW files into Lightroom, it defaults to using the Apple ProRAW colour profile. The colours on this are…let’s just say, they’re not great. It makes it look like it would if you had just shot it normally and not used ProRAW. In particular, shadows seem pushed too much, and highlights have a weird yellow tone. No problem, just switch to one of the Adobe colour profiles, I hear you say. This is where the weirdness comes in. If you switch to the Adobe profile, it will be significantly under exposed.
A little while ago I was going through some photos and I came across a cool shot I had taken in New York of a dog in front of a large window. Unfortunately it was ruined by the reflection of yours truly. Normally removing something like this would be quite time consuming, so I thought, why not try Generative Fill. Not only did it work, but it worked perfectly at removing the reflections and keeping the other detail. So I made a video to show you the process…
Two of the most impressive features added to Lightroom in recent years are the AI-based “Denoise” and “Super Resolution” features that live in the “Enhance” tool. Denoise has been something of a game-changer in particular. Unfortunately, though, you can’t use both of these functions on the same image. Or can you?
In this video I show you how you can use the new lens blur feature in Lightroom Classic 13 to create a faux tilt shift miniature effect in Lightroom. This technique allows you to create the effect without any plug-ins or having to go to Photoshop.
Yesterday, as part of its Max event, Adobe released a new version of the Lightroom family. This includes Lightroom Desktop 7.0, the latest versions of Lightroom mobile and Lightroom Classic 13. In this post, We’ll have a look at some of the key features of Lightroom Classic 13.
I’ve been busy processing a backlog of photos in Lightroom recently, and while working with the software, I noticed a couple of things that I do, of which people may not be aware. These are pretty small tips, and you may already be aware of both of these, but if not, I hope they will be helpful to your workflow in the future. So, without further ado…
A while ago I made a video on how to add white borders to an image for instagram using Lightroom classic’s print module. When I made that video someone asked if you could do the same on the mobile versions of Lightroom. It turns out you can, and it’s actually super easy to do.
Today Adobe released the latest round of photography product updates, including all the versions of Lightroom, camera raw, etc. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to concentrate on Lightroom Classic 12.3. While this sounds like it should be a minor update given that it’s a point release, it is anything but. This could end up being one of the most substantial updates in years, based on just one of the features in the software
In this video I show you a quick tip on how to avoid one go the most annoying problems with Lightroom’s processing engine: Clarity Halos. That is the issue of dark or bright halos or blurry shadows you get when you use too high a clarity setting on a high contrast image.
Yesterday Adobe released Lightroom Classic version 12 along with the corresponding versions of Lightroom Desktop, and Photoshop Camera Raw. All of these feature some significant improvements to masking and other new features. For the purposes of this post, though, I’m only going to talk about Lightroom Classic.
I’ve just published a new photo essay over on my Photo Stories blog. I had visited a nearby urban farm back in May and taken lots of photos, and I was captivated by the colour and texture that images of nature. You should check out the blog post here before you carry on. As I try to keep my Photo Stories blog relatively gear and “technical nerdy stuff” free, I wanted to talk about the technicalities of the images here.
This is a little trick I stumbled across the other day - almost by accident. I was working on editing a photo in Lightroom, and I had made quite a few edits, but I just couldn’t get it where I wanted it. I said to myself: “I wish there was a way I could just dial all the adjustments back a little”. Then it occurred to me - there actually is a way to do that. It requires a few steps and a little roundabout thinking, but it essentially gives you a way to adjust the overall amount of your adjustments with a single slider.
Someone recently asked a question on my Facebook group that, I thought, was actually such a good question that I should write a whole blog post, or perhaps even a series of blog posts about. For a long time, I’ve covered just about every aspect of working with Fuji files in Lightroom Classic, but I’ve never really covered some of the techniques for the non-classic version of Lightroom. While most things are broadly similar, many operations are also slightly different or in slightly different spots, so may be confusing to beginners. So in this post, I’m going to cover some of the fundamentals: how to change the film simulation mode, how to set the film simulation mode to what you shot in-camera on import, and how to use the “enhance” function to get better quality images.
So, way back when Lightroom first came out, many moons ago, one of the complaints from long time Photoshop users was that you couldn’t do a basic Levels adjustment in the software. Well, you actually can, and that is with the whites and blacks sliders. Adjusting the black and white sliders can be useful for a lot of things, but there’s one particular case that I think needs special mention. When working with low contrast scenes, it can be useful to adjust the contrast with a Levels adjustment rather than the contrast slider. Let me explain why.
Adobe has just announced its June photography updates, and this includes new versions of all versions of Lightroom as well as Photoshop and Camera Raw. In this article, I’m only going to be focusing on Lightroom Classic, which is now at version 11.4. This release actually has quite a few new and improved features for a point release, and I’ll outline the key new features in the post (and video) below.
Some people prefer posting their photos to instagram using a frame, with white borders surrounding the image, n order to preserve the original aspect ratio. People are quite divided as to whether or not this is a good thing to do or not, but if you want to do it, there are lots of ways to go about it. If you use Lightroom, there’s actually a pretty easy way to get the white border effect inside of Lightroom, without having to use plug-ins or go to Photoshop.
