Lightroom editing, color grading & visual storytelling

Tutorials

Why Your Exported Photos Look Nothing Like Your Lightroom Edits (And How to Fix It)

I had a client email me once asking why the headshots I delivered looked “washed out and kind of gray” compared to the previews I’d sent over iMessage. I’d spent two hours on those edits. Warm shadows, lifted blacks, a custom preset I’d built around a Gillian Welch record. They looked perfect on my screen. On hers, they looked like they’d been run through a photocopy machine. The edit wasn’t broken.

June 11, 2026

News

How AI Color Grading is Reshaping Creative Workflows in 2024

The AI Revolution Hits Your Edit Suite I’ve been watching the intersection of artificial intelligence and creative tools pretty closely lately, and honestly? We’re at an inflection point. What used to require years of Lightroom mastery is becoming accessible to anyone willing to experiment with emerging technologies. The creative tools landscape just got more interesting. Advanced AI models are rolling out to mainstream users in ways that feel genuinely transformative—not just hype.

June 10, 2026

Workflow & Efficiency

Stop Editing One Photo at a Time: A Real Workflow for Batch Editing in Lightroom

Last Tuesday I had 847 photos from a single session sitting in Lightroom. Wedding, golden hour, outdoor ceremony, great light. The kind of shoot where everything goes right and you pay for it later in the culling process. My needle was playing through a Fleetwood Mac record and I had exactly four hours before delivery. I didn’t panic, because I’ve been here before. I batch edited the whole set in about ninety minutes and spent the remaining time on targeted fine-tuning.

June 9, 2026

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