Photo Editing, Tutorials, Photography News, and More

This Blog is where I share my passion for photo editing, photography technology and sharing my techniques with the world. I cover a range of topics from Lightroom, Photoshop, Capture One, Fujifilm, Canon, Nikon, iPhone Photography, and more. If you want to see more of my actual photography work, visit my Portfolio and Photo Journal blog.

Landscape & Nature, Lightroom, Learning, Video Thomas Fitzgerald Landscape & Nature, Lightroom, Learning, Video Thomas Fitzgerald

New Video: Landscape Photo Editing - From start to Finish in Lightroom & Photoshop

I was recently visiting a somewhat famous waterfall not too far from where I live and of course I took some photos while I was there. We went primarily to enjoy the fresh air and scenery, so it wasn’t a specific photo shoot, but even so I got some interesting images. One worked out particularly well, and I thought my process for editing it would make an interesting video, so here it is!

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Create Dramatic Monochrome Seascapes in Lightroom and SilverEfex

A good while ago now, I posted some photos of a dramatic seascape that I had taken of Dublin bay in the aftermath of a storm. A few people had asked me how I created the dramatic black and white look, and so I thought it would make a good video. I had used a combination of Lightroom and Nik Silver Efex for the processing and in the video I walk you through the process.

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iPhone ProRaw Underexposure in Lightroom and How to fix it

When you import ProRAW files into Lightroom, it defaults to using the Apple ProRAW colour profile. The colours on this are…let’s just say, they’re not great. It makes it look like it would if you had just shot it normally and not used ProRAW. In particular, shadows seem pushed too much, and highlights have a weird yellow tone. No problem, just switch to one of the Adobe colour profiles, I hear you say. This is where the weirdness comes in. If you switch to the Adobe profile, it will be significantly under exposed.

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New Video: Generative Fill is the Best Way to Remove Reflections from Photos

A little while ago I was going through some photos and I came across a cool shot I had taken in New York of a dog in front of a large window. Unfortunately it was ruined by the reflection of yours truly. Normally removing something like this would be quite time consuming, so I thought, why not try Generative Fill. Not only did it work, but it worked perfectly at removing the reflections and keeping the other detail. So I made a video to show you the process…

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Lightroom Classic 13 Released

Yesterday, as part of its Max event, Adobe released a new version of the Lightroom family. This includes Lightroom Desktop 7.0, the latest versions of Lightroom mobile and Lightroom Classic 13. In this post, We’ll have a look at some of the key features of Lightroom Classic 13.

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Two Quick Lightroom Tips

I’ve been busy processing a backlog of photos in Lightroom recently, and while working with the software, I noticed a couple of things that I do, of which people may not be aware. These are pretty small tips, and you may already be aware of both of these, but if not, I hope they will be helpful to your workflow in the future. So, without further ado…

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Lightroom Classic 12.3 – More than a point upgrade?

Today Adobe released the latest round of photography product updates, including all the versions of Lightroom, camera raw, etc. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to concentrate on Lightroom Classic 12.3. While this sounds like it should be a minor update given that it’s a point release, it is anything but. This could end up being one of the most substantial updates in years, based on just one of the features in the software

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Video: How to Eliminate Clarity Halos in Lightroom

In this video I show you a quick tip on how to avoid one go the most annoying problems with Lightroom’s processing engine: Clarity Halos. That is the issue of dark or bright halos or blurry shadows you get when you use too high a clarity setting on a high contrast image.

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Lightroom Classic 12: Major Upgrade - New AI Masking Tools & More - First Look at the New Features

Yesterday Adobe released Lightroom Classic version 12 along with the corresponding versions of Lightroom Desktop, and Photoshop Camera Raw. All of these feature some significant improvements to masking and other new features. For the purposes of this post, though, I’m only going to talk about Lightroom Classic.

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Landscape & Nature, Lightroom, Sony Thomas Fitzgerald Landscape & Nature, Lightroom, Sony Thomas Fitzgerald

Some Technical Details Behind my Latest Photo Essay

I’ve just published a new photo essay over on my Photo Stories blog. I had visited a nearby urban farm back in May and taken lots of photos, and I was captivated by the colour and texture that images of nature. You should check out the blog post here before you carry on. As I try to keep my Photo Stories blog relatively gear and “technical nerdy stuff” free, I wanted to talk about the technicalities of the images here.

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Lightroom trick - How to get an Overall Adjustments Amount Slider

This is a little trick I stumbled across the other day - almost by accident. I was working on editing a photo in Lightroom, and I had made quite a few edits, but I just couldn’t get it where I wanted it. I said to myself: “I wish there was a way I could just dial all the adjustments back a little”. Then it occurred to me - there actually is a way to do that. It requires a few steps and a little roundabout thinking, but it essentially gives you a way to adjust the overall amount of your adjustments with a single slider.

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Managing Fuji Files in Lightroom Desktop/Cloud/Whatever you call it (i.e. the non-classic version of Lightroom)

Someone recently asked a question on my Facebook group that, I thought, was actually such a good question that I should write a whole blog post, or perhaps even a series of blog posts about. For a long time, I’ve covered just about every aspect of working with Fuji files in Lightroom Classic, but I’ve never really covered some of the techniques for the non-classic version of Lightroom. While most things are broadly similar, many operations are also slightly different or in slightly different spots, so may be confusing to beginners. So in this post, I’m going to cover some of the fundamentals: how to change the film simulation mode, how to set the film simulation mode to what you shot in-camera on import, and how to use the “enhance” function to get better quality images.

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Levels in Lightroom? How and when to use levels rather than Contrast

So, way back when Lightroom first came out, many moons ago, one of the complaints from long time Photoshop users was that you couldn’t do a basic Levels adjustment in the software. Well, you actually can, and that is with the whites and blacks sliders. Adjusting the black and white sliders can be useful for a lot of things, but there’s one particular case that I think needs special mention. When working with low contrast scenes, it can be useful to adjust the contrast with a Levels adjustment rather than the contrast slider. Let me explain why.

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Lightroom 11.4 Released - New Features: Mask Improvements, Preset Amount Slider and GPU Export Acceleration

Adobe has just announced its June photography updates, and this includes new versions of all versions of Lightroom as well as Photoshop and Camera Raw. In this article, I’m only going to be focusing on Lightroom Classic, which is now at version 11.4. This release actually has quite a few new and improved features for a point release, and I’ll outline the key new features in the post (and video) below.

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Video: How to add White Borders to Instagram Photos in Lightroom

Some people prefer posting their photos to instagram using a frame, with white borders surrounding the image, n order to preserve the original aspect ratio. People are quite divided as to whether or not this is a good thing to do or not, but if you want to do it, there are lots of ways to go about it. If you use Lightroom, there’s actually a pretty easy way to get the white border effect inside of Lightroom, without having to use plug-ins or go to Photoshop.

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