Lightroom editing, color grading & visual storytelling

Video Tutorials

Blown Highlights Aren't Dead — How I Learned to Stop Deleting and Start Recovering

Last week I was sorting through a set of golden hour shots from Percy Priest Lake and doing that thing photographers do where you hover over the delete key like you’re defusing a bomb. Sky completely blown. Foreground perfect. Classic high-contrast nightmare. My instinct, same as it’s been since I started editing, was to write those frames off and move on. Then I watched this. In this Mark Denney tutorial on recovering blown highlights, he makes an argument I’ve heard before but never fully trusted: that a clipped histogram doesn’t automatically mean a dead photo.

June 7, 2026

Video Tutorials

Lightroom's New Masking Tools Finally Fix the Thing That Was Driving Me Crazy

I was editing a landscape shot last week, a late-afternoon frame with a ridgeline cutting across a gradient sky, and I hit the same wall I’ve been hitting for years. The luminance range mask was doing most of the job, but the edge blending looked like it had been cut out with scissors. I’ve built enough workarounds for this problem that I stopped noticing how annoying it was. That’s a bad sign.

June 6, 2026

Video Tutorials

Double-Click Your Way Out of Lightroom Chaos (Scott Kelby's Fastest Reset Trick)

Last week I was deep into a portrait edit, chasing a warm film look I had in my head, and somewhere between pushing Dehaze too far and getting aggressive with the HSL panel, I lost the plot completely. The image looked like it had been processed by someone who had never seen a photograph before. We’ve all been there. The instinct is to hit Undo fifteen times or just reset the whole develop module and start over, but both options are slower than they need to be — and a full reset throws out the adjustments that were actually working.

June 5, 2026

Color Grading

Why Your Digital Photos Look Wrong (And How Film Emulation Actually Fixes It)

There’s a photo on my hard drive from about eight years ago. My band needed press shots and nobody in our circle could afford a photographer, so I picked up a camera, read enough to be dangerous, and shot them myself. The images were technically fine. Sharp, well-exposed, clean. And they looked completely lifeless. I spent three days trying to figure out why a photo of four people standing in actual sunlight looked like a screenshot from a corporate training video.

June 4, 2026

Video Tutorials

Lightroom's Quietly Dropped Two Masking Features That Change Everything About Local Adjustments

Last month I was editing a shot from Percy Warner Park, golden hour light cutting through a dense tree line, the kind of image that looks effortless until you try to isolate the sky. I dropped a linear gradient over the top third, pulled down the highlights, and the result looked exactly like what it was: a hard-edged box sitting on top of my photo. The tree branches bleeding into the mask looked painted.

June 3, 2026

News

AI Just Walked the Red Carpet: What Dreams of Violets Means for Creative Professionals

The Moment We’ve All Been Waiting For (Or Dreading) This June, something genuinely historic happens at the Tribeca Festival. A feature-length film called “Dreams of Violets” will premiere—and here’s the kicker: every single frame, every actor, every shadow and highlight was created entirely by artificial intelligence. No cameras. No location scouts. No 2 a.m. color grading sessions with cold coffee. I have to admit, when I first heard about this, my gut reaction was complicated.

June 3, 2026