Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
All in Lightroom
This will probably be my last day blogging before Christmas, so I wanted to finish off by giving something back. As I had been working on various projects throughout the year, I have been creating and experimenting with various Lightroom presets, and I ended up with quite a collection. I had originally offered these to Patreon members, but as I’ve shut down my Patreon channel for now, I didn’t want them to go to waste, and so you can download them here.
One of my most popular Capture One posts on this website is the post entitled “Capture One vs Lightroom from someone who uses both”. I last updated this earlier this year, but since then, a lot has changed. With the release of Lightroom 11 which brings the new masking architecture, and Capture One 22 which adds Panorama stitching and HDR merging. This changes the dynamics of my previous arguments for each, and so I wanted to offer an addendum.
I recently wrote a blog post about the new “Recommended Presets” feature of Lightroom (Cloud version) and I mentioned that it was driven by the community. The community feature of Lightroom is probably one of the most underrated features of the software. If you are an experienced photographer, you probably haven’t even looked at it, as you may think — that's just for beginners. However, I think its worth a look for anyone, and in this post I’ll explain why.
Last week I posted on the blog about a new feature in the cloud version of Lightroom that gives you suggestions of presets to use. I’ve now done a video version where I go into it in more depth and show you exactly how to use the new Suggested Presets feature.
I mostly use Lightroom classic, and based on a poll I posted on my Facebook page earlier this year, most of you are the same. However, recently I’ve seen more and more people using the cloud version of Lightroom on YouTube and elsewhere. Because I don’t use it that much, I missed one of the new features in the latest release, that’s actually kind of cool.
I recently decided to close my Patreon channel after several years of running the page. had produced some exclusive videos for Patreon, that because of my failure to grow my channel there, never really got seen by an audience, so I’m going to share some of them here now.
Adobe today released the newest version of Lightroom Classic. Lightroom Classic 11 is perhaps the biggest upgrade to the software in years, and as you have probably read already, it rebuilds what was previously the selective editing interface into a whole new masking architecture. The new Masking function is a pretty big deal and brings new features and capabilities to Lightroom that would have previously required you to use an external editor. There are some other updates too, including some under the hood optimisations that should improve the performance of the software.
Adobe recently released a sneak peek at a fairly significant new feature coming to the Lightroom family and Camera Raw. The masking feature replaces the old gradient and brush tools for making elective edits, and includes the ability to have multiple masks combined in different ways. The masking feature also to use AI to select, with a single click, the sky or key subject. It’s pretty impressive and looks to be one of the biggest feature upgrades to Lightroom in a long time.
I recently posted a set of photos on my Photo Journal blog about a recent trip to a local urban farm and stately home here in Dublin. Over on my Patreon feed, one of my supporters commented that I always seemed to get really nice greens on this kinds of images, so I thought I would share a few tricks as to how I go about shooting these kinds of photos.
On my recent photo essay from Hook lighthouse in Ireland, I was editing the images, and wanted something a little special for the cover photo. I had tried lots of different things, and in the end, the image I used went through several steps to get it to where it was for the final use of it. In this video I talk you through the steps I took from the starting raw photo to the finished image.
I first wrote this article last year, and since then it has become my most popular post on this blog. However, since last year, both applications have continued to develop, and both have had several new features added and both have changed the way they perform, so I felt that it was important to update this article. While the bulk of this will still be the same, there are a few things that have changed that are worth pointing out.
This is one of those tips, that I actually exclaimed out loud when I realised it, but I’ve struggled ever since to figure out how to write about it. The reason is that it’s kind of a very specific nerdy thing, and while I was very excited when I discovered it, trying to figure out a way to explain why you should be excited too, has eluded me. The thing is, for years I’ve had a very specific problem in Lightroom, and there’s been no way around it, until recently. So what is this problem? Read on for more.
It’s been a while since I’ve had a photograph that I’ve been really pleased with, what with the Pandemic and lockdown limiting photo taking opportunities. I had actually created this photo and posted it to Instagram, when some people asked me if I could do a tutorial explaining how I had edited the photo. So, I went back and recreated the edit and in this video I walk you through my process from start to finish.
Recently both Capture One and Lightroom have been released as Apple Silicon native versions. I have covered both of these in videos on my YouTube channel recently. For Capture One I showed you how the interface responds with the new version, and for Lightroom, I did a test comparing import and export speeds for the M1 native version compared to the older version running under rosetta. Since I had the benchmarks for this, I figured why not run the same test for Capture One.
Today, as part of the June photography updates, Adobe launches the latest version of Lightroom Classic. Version 10.3 brings native support for Apple silicon, as well as adding the “Super Resolution” feature from the most recent release of Photoshop.
It’s been a while since I updated my recommendations for Lightroom processing of Fuji files. Since then, Lightroom has been changing quite a bit, and so, while I had planned it before but never got around to it, I’m now in the pre-production stages of re-writing my Fuji Lightroom guide. One of the big things I’m changing is how I recommend people process their Fuji files for the best results.
This is kind of a nerdy tip, but it’s actually a really useful thing to understand. Here’s the premise - you’re using Lightroom as your main way of organising your photos, but you want to use some other application to edit your raw file for whatever reason, and bring the result back into Lightroom. If you use the edit with function in Lightroom, you will only send a Tiff or PSD file rather than a RAW file, so unless the application to which you want to send it has a plug in, there isn’t an easy workflow. Or is there?
I’ve been working of a pretty old computer for some time now. My main workstation was an ageing 2012 Mac Pro, which despite its age was working perfectly for why I needed. Or at least I thought it was. I decided to take the plunge and embrace the future with an M1 MacBook Pro. It’s been an eye-opening experience.
