Lightroom Tips

The Hidden Amount Slider That Changes How I Use Lightroom's Local Adjustments
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The Hidden Amount Slider That Changes How I Use Lightroom's Local Adjustments

There’s a category of Lightroom feature I think of as “hiding in plain sight” — things that have been in the software for a while, that plenty of experienced editors have never noticed, and that quietly change the way you work once you find them. The Amount slider collapse in local adjustments is exactly that kind of feature. I stumbled across this tip in a recent tutorial from Matt Kloskowski, and my first reaction was genuine annoyance that I hadn’t known about it sooner.

Lightroom Preset Organization Tips That Actually Stick (5 Techniques From a Pro Workflow)
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Lightroom Preset Organization Tips That Actually Stick (5 Techniques From a Pro Workflow)

If you’ve worked in Lightroom long enough, you know the feeling: your preset panel looks like someone knocked over a filing cabinet, you can’t find the one you want, and you’re wasting time on organizational problems instead of actually editing. I’ve spent 15 years running post-production workflows for ad agencies and e-commerce clients, and I can tell you that a messy preset library is the kind of slow leak that quietly costs you hours every month.

The Lightroom Preset Trick That Saves You From Rebuilding the Same Look Over and Over
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The Lightroom Preset Trick That Saves You From Rebuilding the Same Look Over and Over

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from building a look you love inside Lightroom, knowing you’re going to want it again, and then realizing you can’t save it the way you’d expect. I’ve been doing post-production work for fifteen years, and I still run into this. You develop a multi-step technique, something that takes four or five minutes to apply manually, and your brain immediately starts calculating how many times you’ll have to repeat that process across a shoot.

Lightroom Preset Tips You Probably Haven't Thought About (But Should)
Video Tutorials

Lightroom Preset Tips You Probably Haven't Thought About (But Should)

I keep a spreadsheet of the hours my automated workflows have saved me. Over 2,400 hours at last count. That number didn’t happen by accident. It happened because I’ve spent years paying attention to the small details that most people skip past, the kind of thing you notice when you’re processing hundreds of images for an e-commerce client and one weird behavior in your software costs you twenty minutes of confused clicking.