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I Switched to a Wacom Tablet for Lightroom Editing and I'm Not Going Back
Video Tutorials

I Switched to a Wacom Tablet for Lightroom Editing and I'm Not Going Back

I’ve been editing photos in Lightroom long enough to have strong opinions about things most people don’t notice, like the exact amount of friction a scroll wheel should have, or why the brush tool with a mouse feels like trying to paint with a bar of soap. For years I told myself the mouse was fine. It’s fine. Everyone uses a mouse. Then I watched Thomas Heaton pick up a Wacom Intuos Pro tablet for the first time and start editing like he’d been born with a stylus in his hand, and I felt that specific kind of creative jealousy that means you need to change something.

Why Your Lightroom Photos Look Banded and Funky (And How to Fix It)
Video Tutorials

Why Your Lightroom Photos Look Banded and Funky (And How to Fix It)

I’ve been editing photos in Lightroom long enough to know that the application has a gift for making you doubt yourself at exactly the wrong moment. You’re culling a shoot, you land on a landscape with a gorgeous gradient sky, and suddenly the sky looks like a television losing signal - horizontal lines cutting through what should be smooth, clean tones. Your stomach drops. You start mentally calculating whether your camera sensor is dying or your monitor is going bad.

How to Edit 500 Photos in the Time It Usually Takes You to Edit 20
Workflow & Efficiency

How to Edit 500 Photos in the Time It Usually Takes You to Edit 20

Last spring I agreed to cover a friend’s wedding as a favor. Not as the photographer, just as a backup shooter with a mirrorless camera and a wide-angle lens. Three hours later I had 600 raw files, a headache, and a very clear reminder of why I stopped shooting events. The editing wasn’t the problem. The volume was. And if you’ve ever come home from a shoot, opened Lightroom, and felt your stomach drop at the number in the bottom corner of your catalog, you know exactly what I mean.

Warm It Up: A Photoshop Layer-by-Layer Guide to Soft, Golden Fashion Tones
Video Tutorials

Warm It Up: A Photoshop Layer-by-Layer Guide to Soft, Golden Fashion Tones

There’s a specific problem I run into more than I’d like to admit. I shoot a portrait session on an overcast Nashville afternoon, pull the RAW files into Photoshop, and the whole thing looks like a dental office waiting room. Technically correct. Emotionally inert. The image needs warmth, not just a temperature slider drag, but a layered, intentional warmth that reads as a creative choice rather than a fix. That’s exactly the territory Jessica Kobeissi covers in her tutorial on creating a warm-toned fashion photo.

Bring Portraits to Life in Lightroom: Enhancing Eyes and Hair with the Adjustment Brush
Video Tutorials

Bring Portraits to Life in Lightroom: Enhancing Eyes and Hair with the Adjustment Brush

There’s a specific kind of portrait that haunts you. The light was perfect, the subject was stunning, and then you open the file and realize the hair has collapsed into a muddy shadow and the eyes look flat. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit. For a long time my reflex was to jump straight into Photoshop and start reaching for luminosity masks. It worked, but it was slow, and half the time I was overcomplicating something that didn’t need to be complicated.

How to Build a Photography Style That's Actually Yours (A Lightroom Breakdown)
Video Tutorials

How to Build a Photography Style That's Actually Yours (A Lightroom Breakdown)

Every few months I’ll open my Lightroom catalog and feel that low-grade anxiety of looking at a grid of images that don’t quite belong together. Good photos, technically. But no thread connecting them. No sense that one person made all of these. If you’ve ever scrolled your own feed and thought “this looks like four different photographers,” this one’s for you. In this Nigel Danson tutorial, Watch the full tutorial on YouTube, Nigel tackles the question he says he gets asked more than anything else: how do you actually build a style?

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 on a Tuesday afternoon, mostly as an experiment. By Friday it had 50,000 downloads. I hadn’t charged a cent for it. The emails I got back were mostly some version of the same sentence: “I applied the preset and it looks nothing like your example photo.” That told me everything I needed to know about how people misunderstand what presets actually are.

Two Lightroom Tricks I Wish I'd Known During My First 1,000 Bracket Shots
Video Tutorials

Two Lightroom Tricks I Wish I'd Known During My First 1,000 Bracket Shots

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from shooting a bracketed sequence at golden hour, getting home, and realizing you have to manually drag exposure sliders on eight nearly identical files just to compare them fairly. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit. Back when I was editing press shots for my band on a borrowed laptop, I developed some genuinely bad habits around bracketed editing, and some of those habits followed me into my professional workflow longer than they should have.

Why Lightroom Feels Slow When Browsing (And the Two-Step Fix That Actually Works)
Video Tutorials

Why Lightroom Feels Slow When Browsing (And the Two-Step Fix That Actually Works)

There’s a specific kind of frustration that hits when you’ve just come back from a shoot with 400 raw files and Lightroom turns every arrow key press into a three-second waiting game. I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit. Early on, I thought it was just the price of shooting raw. You take the slow rendering as payment for the flexibility. Turns out, I was wrong. I was just using Lightroom in the worst possible way for browsing.

Dehaze, Clarity, and Texture: The Lightroom Tools I Kept Getting Wrong (And How to Actually Use Them)
Video Tutorials

Dehaze, Clarity, and Texture: The Lightroom Tools I Kept Getting Wrong (And How to Actually Use Them)

For a long time, I treated the Dehaze slider like that one guitar pedal you keep on your board but never actually turn on. Too risky, too unpredictable, too easy to ruin a shot that was almost there. Clarity I’d use occasionally, usually too aggressively, and texture felt like the polite, younger sibling of a tool I didn’t fully understand either. I knew something was off about how I was using them, but I couldn’t articulate why my results kept looking crunchy, strange, or just weirdly brown.

ON1 Photo RAW 2027 Raises the Bar for Image Quality and Nondestructive Editing
News

ON1 Photo RAW 2027 Raises the Bar for Image Quality and Nondestructive Editing

ON1 Photo RAW 2027 Raises the Bar for Image Quality and Nondestructive Editing The RAW editing landscape just got more competitive. ON1 has dropped Photo RAW 2027, and they’re making some bold claims about what their refreshed nondestructive editor can do for your photographs. What’s Changed? The big selling point here is image quality. According to ON1, they’ve made substantial improvements under the hood that should translate to cleaner, more refined results when you’re pushing your edits.

5 Lightroom Classic Tips That Will Actually Change How You Edit
Video Tutorials

5 Lightroom Classic Tips That Will Actually Change How You Edit

There’s a particular kind of frustration that comes from knowing a tool has more to offer than you’re pulling out of it. I’ve been editing in Lightroom for years, and I still hit moments where I realize I’ve been doing something the slow way, or skipping a feature entirely because I didn’t quite understand what it was for. That’s what kept me watching this tutorial from start to finish. Watch the full tutorial on YouTube before or after you read this breakdown – either way, you’ll get more out of it with both.