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Cringe at the Fringe – Chromatic Aberration in Lightroom

Chromatic Aberration distortion is an issue you see with many non-DSLR and older DSLR cameras. By definition: In optics, chromatic aberration (also called achromatism or chromatic distortion) is a type of distortion in which there is a failure of a lens to focus all colors to the same convergence point. It occurs because lenses have [...]

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Quickie Fix – Exposure

Everyone has encountered shots that have been over or under exposed before. Be it accidental or the result of bracketing, there are always a few less than ideal exposures in any project. Fixing each of the images can be time consuming, but if you leverage some tricks in Lightroom, you can speed up your workflow [...]

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Bestest of Friends – Histogram and Tone Curve

It sits in the upper right hand corner of the Library and Develop Modules of Lightroom. Outside of a quick glance now and again, how often do you even consider the Histogram in Lightroom? For that matter, outside of helping detect highlight and shadow clipping, what is the Histogram even good for? Simply put, the [...]

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Making the Split – Split Toning for the rest of us

Split Toning in Lightroom is quite simply a real-life lesson in simple complexity. The tools is five, simple sliders that together create an effect over an entire image. Split Toning is amazingly simple to use, but using the Split Toning tools effectively can be surprisingly complex. Split Toning can be easily used to quickly and [...]

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Mad Stacks Yo! – Stacking images in Lightroom

One of the biggest debates in using Lightroom revolves around the best way to organize your library. I used to have images scattered all over different drives with no format whatsoever and had tons of duplicates from shoots with different flags, colors and stars. I started to browse the internet for some guidance and found [...]

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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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Lightroom Speed Tips – Fast, Fun, Easy

We were discussing some of our favorite Lightroom tips with some fellow photographers this weekend and we were reminded of our Tip ‘O The Week series we tucked away in the X=101 Category. Rather than keep things as a bunch of mini-posts, and in the spirit of making things EASIER for everyone to access and [...]

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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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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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