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Lightroom Collections – Bringing Your Images Together

Much has been mentioned lately about using Collections in Lightroom for organizing your images as opposed to using your system folders you store your images in. Even if you maintain a meticulous folder structure, organizing your photos on your hard drive, it can sometimes become cumbersome finding particular images, or working with images that are in [...]

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Turn down the volume – Noise Reduction in Lightroom

When it comes to shooting high ISO images and processing in Lightroom, the general consensus is Lightroom is unable to do a reasonable job at reducing noise. While it is true that Lightroom will not perform as well as Noise Ninja or Nik Dfine day in and day out, Lightroom can handle much of you [...]

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Good to the last Drop – Photoshop Droplets

I always loved Photoshop for its ability to create Actions, and in turn automate a LOT of my work by leveraging those actions to create Photoshop Droplets for batch processing. And, the best part is I can access these Actions from directly within Lightroom. By leveraging Droplets within your Lightroom workflow, you can take advantage [...]

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Keeping it Raw in Photoshop – Part 3 of 3

Previously in Part 1 and Part 2, we created a composite image utilizing Smart Objects and layer masking in Photoshop. From those previous two articles, you are armed with the required tools to create dynamic images easily in Photoshop without having to lose the versatility of Raw. Today we will finish the images created, covering [...]

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Keeping it Raw in Photoshop – Part 2 of 3

Alright, so Part 1 of this series is fully digested, right? Well it is time to build on that procedure and really flex this workflows muscle. If you recall, I asked you to think about what presets you really like in Lightroom and to convert then to Adobe Camera Raw profiles using the past tutorial. [...]

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Keeping it Raw in Photoshop – Part 1 of 3

Previously I introduced X-Equals readers to Smart Objects in Photoshop as a method by which you can maintain the capabilities and quality of RAW, but still utilize many of the stellar features of Photoshop. In this series I am going to outline my RAW workflow within Photoshop, leveraging Smart Objects and Adobe Camera Raw to maintain [...]

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The Lightroom Painter – It’s not just for keywords!

It’s a rather tiny icon, and you probably don’t give it much thought … I know I didn’t. Yet it’s so simple and does its job so well it’s time to give this little guy a shot. Luckily for you, we’ve taken the mystery out of this hidden gem with some examples of how you [...]

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Lightroom Best Practices – Adventures in Workflow

As Summer winds down to a close here in Chicago, we’ve taken some time to reflect on the past few seasons and some of our favorite posts. These little gems are a small taste of our upcoming Best Practices in Workflow book coming out in December*. We guarantee one of the below posts will shave [...]

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Extending Lightroom – LR2/Mogrify

LR2/Mogrify is probably the absolute most useful plug-in for extending Lightroom. Timothy Armes’ plug-in was developed to utilize the ImageMagick software suite to further manipulate and edit images after you have completed editing in Lightroom as the file is exported. LR2/Mogrify allows you to extend Lightroom’s core capabilities further, allowing you to carry out functions [...]

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Snapshots – Versioning Made Easy

Snapshots in Lightroom are a little discussed feature, underappreciated and often undervalued in many a workflow. Most often, Snapshots are overlooked in favor of Virtual Copies, but in certain situations Snapshots can be useful. A Snapshot in Lightroom is like a picture of an images development settings. You can process an image, create a Snapshot [...]

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