Well, it's hard to believe that 2008 is coming to a close and 2009 is just over the next hill! Now is the time of year we all start thinking about what went on this past year and planning on what we'll do to make the new year better. Don't leave Lightroom out of you annual musings!

Make it a point to go through your collection of work for 2008. Before you press that shutter release in 2009 try and get a handle on where you are in your work.

In this post we will discuss printing an overlay graphic using Lightroom's print module.

Earlier this month I described several techniques I use for capturing multiple exposures that can be merged to create a single High Dynamic Range Image (HDRI). I also discussed HDRsoft’s new Photomatix plug-in for Lightroom. You can catch entire blog...

Often we can get too involved with the mechanics of photography and forget about the magic of just being there, seeing, and snapping pictures.

A quick Holiday Post, the time for shopping is getting short… Recently a photographer switching to Lightroom [LR] asked if he could print on a black background with a white border as he did in Photoshop [PS]. Well, the answer...

Adobe first released Lightroom in 2006 as a public beta, asking photographers to participate in the design through the associated discussion forum. While that forum is now closed, the opportunity to influence the direction of Lightroom still exists.

Tucked away in the keyword panel is a section called Keyword Set. There is another workflow enhancement built into Lightroom here. The sooner you get some basic keywords on an image the better off you'll be later. If you get in the habit of adding keywords early on you'll be glad you did.

In helping a Lightroom user, I tripped over a shortcut for entering 'child' keywords, which I hadn't previously encountered ...

Stacks are pretty cool … I use them quite a bit while I shuffle around images in Library mode. There’s a very nice shortcut for creating and collapsing stacks that I’m totally digging lately … it’s ultra-simple: Select the images...

In the last post I wrote about LR2's Graduated Filter. The other localized editing tool, which many think might be the most significant addition to LR2, is the Adjustment Brush [AB]. The AB (keyboard shortcut "K" in your program) allows you to "paint" localized non-destructive effects like Exposure, Saturation, Sharpness, etc. You can then change or add parameters to the selected area and fine tune the effect to your image.

Keywords in Lightroom are at the very foundation of organizing your images. If you ever want to find those images again you had better add some keywords now! Of course, as your collection of images grows, so does your list of keywords. In a previous article I talked about using hierarchies in your keyword list. This helps bring order to your collection and unclutter you list so you can find things. To further help you organize and unclutter, Lightroom supports synonyms. Let's take a look at this powerful feature.

When bought my first digital SLR in April 2006, moving from scanned film, I gave up Photoshop completely. Quit cold turkey. At that time Lightroom was at public beta #2, and it certainly wasn't capable of doing everything Photoshop could (and still isn't). But even then there was considerable overlap in their capabilities, and rather than allowing myself to fall back on what I knew, I forced myself to learn the new ways of thinking.

A few years ago I made a decision in Photoshop that is affecting me greatly today. I chose to save my Photoshop (PSD) files with Maximize Compatibility (MC) turned off. MC saves a flattened version of your file along with...

A short while ago, Adobe released Camera RAW and DNG converter 5.2. These freebie updates herald an upcoming update to Lightroom - 2.2 which I am looking forward to for several reasons. In the mean time, DNG converter can be...

One of the most powerful and useful features of Lightroom is its keyword capability. Not only can you create a useful set of keywords but Lightroom allows you to put those keywords into a hierarchical structure. This adds a further level of organization to your keywords. Instead of scrolling through an ever growing list of keywords, you can categorize them in a collapsible structure.

This weeks tip has been around since version 1.0 of Lightroom, and although I personally do not use it that often, it’s a great image inspection technique. Normally, I’m pushing images to 72ppi for proofing on the web, which...

One of my favorite programs for creating HDR images is Photomatix. Until just recently, there wasn't an easy way for Lightroom users to jump directly into Photomatix. In October, HDRsoft solved this problem by releasing a brand new plug-in that allows you to open images in Photomatix directly from Lightroom. Here's how it works.

So how does one make a 20+ MP camera from a 6MP one? The answer is panoramic stitching of multiple images...

In addition to storing your raw image adjustments in the Lightroom catalog, you can also save the information to an XMP sidecar file. In this article we examine what information is not kept in XMP.

We all have come to love Lightroom 2’s new Graduated Filter [GF] tool. (That’s keyboard shortcut “M” in your program.) A common use of this filter is to affect the sky, very similar to photographing using split filters… adding blue...

Sticking to my promise to expose more complete details on my workflow for select projects, we’re going to look at a detailed workflow leveraging one of Lightroom 2.0’s localized correction tools. This post roots itself in my previous tutorial...

Here’s a second take on Michael Clark’s earlier article on post-shoot work flow, where my event photography processing leads me to a different approach….