Collections in Lightroom are a key tool for organizing images. There are some benefits to working with collections and some things that it helps to know about working with them. 1. Collections: Smart or regular? There are two types of collections in Lightroom, Smart Collections which are populated

**UPDATE – THIS COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED – THANKS TO ALL THAT ENTERED** During the week we got the following press release from the makers Photosmith – a cool App for iPads. We also got permission to give a couple of copies of it away so once you see if it’s for you –

In Lightroom you can fix a series of images all at once using the Quick Develop Panel in the Library Module. While this tool lacks the precise adjustments you can make to an image in the Develop Module, it offers a quick solution for getting started fixing your images. To make use of the Quick Dev

Most of us have heard of IPTC metadata but not everyone knows what it is, whether it is important to them or how to add it to their photos. In this post I’ll cover some of the basics of adding personal information about you as photographer as IPTC metadata to your images. I won’t be tal

If you work in Lightroom, at some stage you’ll probably want to take an image to Photoshop for some additional processing. How you send it to Photoshop will have an impact on the options available to you. One option in Lightroom is to take an image to Photoshop as a Smart Object and that has

Gradient filters are not familiar to most beginning photographers even though they have been around a long time. The neutral density version of these filters strives to impart no color or tinting to the image, thus keeping color rendition true while darkening part of the image. Further, the gradient

One of the nice things about Lightroom is that it lets you view before and after versions of your image. Lightroom can do this so easily because it does not make permanent changes to your image as you work on it. Instead, Lightroom keeps a log of the edits that you have made and only applies them to

With Lightroom 3 Beta having just been released, the first thing that most people will do – as I did – is to look and see if the features that you’ve always wanted in the program have been added. One of the areas that Lightroom 2 fell a little short on in my book was the Print modu

There have been questions posted as comments recently asking about the role of Lightroom in a photographer’s workflow. Many posters who are not currently using Lightroom aren’t sure whether Lightroom it is an alternative to Photoshop or where it fits if you have Photoshop too. I thought

One of the really handy features of Lightroom is its ability to create web slideshows quickly and easily. There are various options you can use and I’ll show you how to use the SimpleViewer slideshow which is good looking and very functional. Step 1 To get started, prepare all your images an

There is so much of Lightroom that’s not apparent when you first begin using it and that takes time to discover and explore. Here are my five coolest Lightroom techniques that you might want to add to your Lightroom toolkit. 1. Shortcuts There are a lot and lots of keystroke shortcuts in Ligh

I was recently asked by photographer Rhonda Pierce to look at an image that she’d taken and to suggest how the background could be lightened to white in Lightroom. This image raises an interesting question for anyone involved in post production and trying to understand when to use Lightroom a

Introduction If you have been anywhere near the photography world in the past couple years, I am sure you have heard of HDR by now as there have been countless tutorials floating around on how to create HDR images using 3 bracketed exposures in programs like Photomatix and Photoshop. However what i

If you’re a keen photographer, chances are that you publish some of your photos to Flickr for sharing with friends and family. One of the disadvantages of Lightroom 2 is that it does not come with a built in tool for publishing direct to Flickr although this has been addressed in Lightroom 3 w

Often when you’re working in Lightroom you will want the images to be sorted in the order that you want to see them, not in as order such as capture date which is one of the Lightroom sort options. You may want to do this when assembling images for a slide show or for printing, for example a

One of the annoyances most photographers encounter from time to time is sensor dust. This is dust that you get on the camera’s sensor and which shows up in your images as dark marks or flaws on your photos. Most often you’ll see this in the sky but it can appear anywhere in an image and

When you spend a lot of your editing time in Lightroom it makes sense to learn how to work the interface so it behaves as you need it to. In a previous post I listed some of my favourite Lightroom interface features. Here are my next favourite five, most of which have earned a place in my repertoire

One complaint about Lightroom 2 is its lack of a feature enabling you to add copyright watermarks to your images as you Export them. There are workarounds that make use of the Identity Plate option in the slideshow and print modules but these are cumbersome at best. In Lightroom 3, at last, watermar

Lightroom’s Survey view is a tool that makes choosing one image from a group of images a simpler process. In this post I’ll show you how to use Survey View and some tricks for working with it. Step 1 To see it at work, in the Library module, select a series of images on the filmstrip by

In an earlier post, I showed you how to use Lightroom’s Survey View to choose one image from a selection of images. In this post I’ll show you how to use another of Lightroom’s specialty views – Compare View which has a similar purpose but which operates very differently.