Black and white doesn’t have to be completely black and white! If you preserve just a splash of colour you can create a very striking effect, and it’s a very easy technique to try out because it doesn’t need any complex selections or colour adjustments. The same broad technique can be applied in most image-editors, but […]
Lightroom reviews, tips and tutorials
Lightroom is Adobe's all-in-one photo organizing, RAW processing and editing tool. It can be used on its own or alongside Photoshop, which is designed for more complex editing and illustration work.
You can only get Lightroom as part of Adobe's various subscription plans. The Adobe Photography Plan page explains these in more detail.
There are now two versions of Lightroom, which makes things more complicated. Lightroom Classic CC is the more powerful 'traditional' version which use images stored locally on your computer. Lightroom CC is a newer, slimmed-down version that uses cloud-based storage where all your images are available everywhere. This Lightroom CC vs Lightroom Classic CC comparison explains the key differences.
Speed up your workflow with Lightroom import settings
How often do you find yourself making the same adjustments to your images in Lightroom? In fact, there are some which are so useful you might want Lightroom to do them automatically for every image you import… and you probably won’t be surprised to learn that’s exactly what the Lightroom import settings allow you to […]
How to use the Lightroom adjustment brush tool to dodge and burn your colour shots
Dodging and burning was a standard darkroom technique for black and white photographers, but it works just as well on colour shots. ‘Dodging’ is where you lighten selected areas of the image and ‘burning’ is where you darken them. With the Lightroom adjustment brush tool this is really easy to do, and you can control […]
Try out the Lightroom Graduated Filter color effect
The Graduated Filter tool is one of Lightroom’s most useful features. It can darken overexposed skies, working directly with the RAW data to recover blown highlights at the same time. But it’s easy to overlook the Lightroom Graduated Filter Color effect. Normally, you might just darken the sky and stop there, but the small Color […]
How to use the the Lightroom Snapshot feature to compare editing techniques
If you’ve used Photoshop and Elements, you’ll probably have noticed the History palette. This keeps track of everything you’ve done since you opened the image, so if something goes wrong you can backtrack to an earlier state. Photoshop goes one better than Elements by adding a Snapshot feature, where you can separately record specific image […]
How to adjust the point curve in Lightroom
Curves adjustments are tricky to get right. Small changes can have a big impact on the image, and it’s easy to make things worse not better. That’s why Adobe’s provided a secret weapon – the Adjust Point Curve tool in Lightroom. Normally, you make curves adjustments by estimating or measuring the position of the area […]
How to use creative sharpening in Lightroom
There is more than one type of sharpening. It’s a common mistake for photographers to look at an image, choose a sharpening setting that looks right and imagine that they’ve fixed it. They may have made it worse… In fact, there are three types of sharpening, and they do three different jobs. These are ‘capture […]
How to control noise for better portraits in Lightroom
Shooting in available light often gives the most natural and attractive portraits, but it also means you often have to shoot at high ISOs. I took this informal picture while I was working on a feature for N-Photo magazine, and while the light from the window is soft and even, it’s not very bright and […]
Using Lightroom 5’s Radial Gradient tool
The editing tools in Lightroom 5 are steadily improving to the point where many photographers won’t need any other software for their day-to-day image enhancement, and the new Radial Gradient tool in the Develop module takes this one stage further. It offers a way to quickly highlight the focal point of your pictures, subdue backgrounds […]
Get more accurate colours with Lightroom’s Camera Calibration panel
Have you ever noticed that the colours in the JPEGs you get from the camera don’t always match up with your RAW files when you open them in Adobe Camera Raw? That’s because when you shoot a JPEG, the camera still starts off by capturing a RAW file but then processes it in camera to […]