Lightroom editing, color grading & visual storytelling

Lightroom editing, color grading & visual storytelling — by Alex Rowe

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How to Edit a Sunrise RAW File When the Sky Is Already Doing the Work
Video Tutorials

How to Edit a Sunrise RAW File When the Sky Is Already Doing the Work

There’s a specific kind of editing panic that hits when a shot is already beautiful straight out of camera. You open the RAW file, the colors are wild, the light is doing something genuinely magical, and suddenly every adjustment feels like you’re either underselling it or wrecking it. I hit that exact wall last spring shooting golden hour along the Cumberland River. The sky was doing everything right. I did too much in post.

Split Toning Is the Difference Between a Good Edit and a Memorable One
Color Grading

Split Toning Is the Difference Between a Good Edit and a Memorable One

I had a folder of band press shots sitting on my desktop for three days before I figured out what was wrong with them. The exposure was right. The white balance was dialed. The skin tones looked natural. And the photos were completely, aggressively boring. They looked like stock photos of musicians rather than actual musicians. It wasn’t until I added a warm amber to the shadows and a faint blue to the highlights that the whole thing clicked.

What Lightroom Presets Actually Do to Your Files (And Why Most People Use Them Wrong)
Lightroom Editing

What Lightroom Presets Actually Do to Your Files (And Why Most People Use Them Wrong)

A few years ago I released a preset pack on a Tuesday night, mostly because I’d spent the entire weekend building it and felt too stubborn to let it sit on my hard drive. I named every preset after a song, priced the pack at zero dollars, and went to bed. By Friday it had 50,000 downloads. The number wasn’t the surprising part. The surprising part was how many people emailed me to say the presets “weren’t working” because their photos looked nothing like the preview images on the download page.

What Lightroom Presets Actually Do to Your Raw Files (And Why Most People Use Them Wrong)
Lightroom Editing

What Lightroom Presets Actually Do to Your Raw Files (And Why Most People Use Them Wrong)

A few years ago I released a preset pack called Slow Burn — named after a Kacey Musgraves track, because I name all my presets after songs and I’m not sorry about it. I built the whole thing over one long weekend, uploaded it for free, and watched it pull 50,000 downloads inside of a month. The flood of follow-up emails taught me something I hadn’t expected: most of the people using those presets were frustrated.

When the Sky Blows Out: A Practical Guide to Recovering Highlights in Lightroom
Video Tutorials

When the Sky Blows Out: A Practical Guide to Recovering Highlights in Lightroom

Last week I was culling through a batch of golden hour landscapes and kept landing on the same problem: skies that had gone completely white. Not just bright. Gone. The kind of blown-out exposure that makes you wonder if your histogram was even trying. My instinct, the same one I had for years, was to flag those frames and move on. But I’ve learned to sit with them longer now, because more often than not, the detail is still in there.

Google's New AI Image Tool Changes the Game for Creative Workflows
News

Google's New AI Image Tool Changes the Game for Creative Workflows

Google’s New AI Image Tool Changes the Game for Creative Workflows I’ve been watching the AI image generation space explode over the last couple of years, and honestly? Most of the tools have felt clunky and disconnected from real creative workflows. That changed this week when Google unveiled their latest creation tool integrated directly into their Workspace ecosystem. What’s Different This Time The beauty of this new platform isn’t that it generates images from scratch—we’ve all seen that done a thousand times by now.

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