Workflow

Lightroom's Density Slider Is Not What You Think (And That's the Point)
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Lightroom's Density Slider Is Not What You Think (And That's the Point)

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from knowing exactly what you want a tool to do and feeling like it’s fighting you. I ran into this with Lightroom’s Adjustment Brush embarrassingly late in my career. I’d spent years in Photoshop building actions, dialing in brush opacity and flow to get precise, repeatable results on skin, product surfaces, backgrounds. Then I’d jump into Lightroom for a raw edit and the Adjustment Brush would just feel… blunt.

Generative Fill vs. Content-Aware Fill: A Working Photographer's Guide to Removing Distractions in Photoshop
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Generative Fill vs. Content-Aware Fill: A Working Photographer's Guide to Removing Distractions in Photoshop

Distraction removal is one of those tasks that sounds simple until you’re staring at a client’s hero shot with a rogue piece of equipment cutting through an otherwise clean frame. I’ve been in that position more times than I can count, and the solution has changed dramatically over the last few years. What used to require careful cloning, patch work, and a lot of crossed fingers has become something closer to a creative decision than a technical grind.

Presets Aren't Shortcuts — They're a Thinking Tool (Here's How to Use Them That Way)
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Presets Aren't Shortcuts — They're a Thinking Tool (Here's How to Use Them That Way)

I’ll be honest with you. Early in my commercial work, I treated presets the way a lot of people do: click, hope, move on. I bought packs, applied them wholesale to client images, and wondered why the results felt borrowed rather than intentional. It took a few years of production pressure, and eventually watching people who actually knew what they were doing, to understand that presets are a diagnostic tool first and a finishing tool second.

Work Smarter With Lightroom's Adjustment Brush: The Auto Mask Shortcut That Changes Everything
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Work Smarter With Lightroom's Adjustment Brush: The Auto Mask Shortcut That Changes Everything

If you shoot anything that requires selective exposure adjustments — portraits, architecture, product work, anything with a foreground subject you want to separate from a background — you already know the adjustment brush is one of the most powerful tools in Lightroom and Camera Raw. You probably also know the frustration of painting too far, blowing past an edge, and having to redo a mask you spent five minutes building. That specific pain is what pulled me into Watch the full tutorial on YouTube from Matt Kloskowski, a photographer and educator whose approach to Lightroom workflow I’ve respected for years.

What Peter McKinnon's Workflow Update Video Actually Teaches You About Sustainable Creative Systems
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What Peter McKinnon's Workflow Update Video Actually Teaches You About Sustainable Creative Systems

There’s a category of video that looks like a vlog but functions like a masterclass. Peter McKinnon’s update video, Watch the full tutorial on YouTube, falls squarely into that category. On the surface it’s a catch-up: drone giveaway results, fan mail, life updates after a two-week trip to Kenya with World Vision. Underneath, it’s a working demonstration of how a high-output creative keeps multiple project threads alive simultaneously without letting any of them collapse.

Browse, Comp, and Buy Stock Photos Without Leaving Photoshop: The iStock Plugin Workflow
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Browse, Comp, and Buy Stock Photos Without Leaving Photoshop: The iStock Plugin Workflow

Stock photo hunting has always been one of those invisible time thieves in my workflow. You’re deep in a comp, you need a hero image, and suddenly you’ve got six browser tabs open, three watermarked downloads cluttering your desktop, and you’ve completely lost your train of thought on the actual design work. Over the years I’ve built systems to compress almost every repetitive task in Photoshop down to keystrokes and actions, but the stock image sourcing step always seemed immune to optimization.

Lightroom Profiles Are the Non-Destructive Edit Layer I Didn't Know I Needed
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Lightroom Profiles Are the Non-Destructive Edit Layer I Didn't Know I Needed

I’ve spent fifteen years building systems that save time in post-production. My entire consultancy runs on the idea that repetitive manual steps are the enemy of good work. So when a feature ships inside a tool I use every single day and I completely miss it, that stings a little. That’s what happened with Lightroom Profiles. I’d been clicking past them for weeks before I actually stopped and paid attention.

How to Get Your Lightroom Classic Presets onto Your Phone in Three Steps
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How to Get Your Lightroom Classic Presets onto Your Phone in Three Steps

I spend a lot of time building systems so I don’t have to think twice on a deadline. Presets are a big part of that. Over the years I’ve developed a library of custom Lightroom adjustments tuned specifically for the kind of work I do – product photography, e-commerce, the occasional ad campaign. They live in Lightroom Classic, which is where I do all my serious editing. But more and more, clients want quick turnaround on selects reviewed from a phone, or they want me to make a light pass on tethered shots while I’m still on location.

From Rope Photo to Pattern Brush: A Cross-App Workflow That Actually Holds Up
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From Rope Photo to Pattern Brush: A Cross-App Workflow That Actually Holds Up

Most of my work lives inside repeatable systems. Actions, batch exports, preset pipelines built to survive a Monday morning with 300 product shots due by noon. But every so often a client brief lands that needs something handcrafted-looking, something with texture and physicality that a gradient overlay just cannot fake. That’s when brush work and pattern techniques become genuinely useful, not decorative exercises. This particular workflow came across my radar through Watch the full tutorial on YouTube from Kelvin Designs, where Kelvin walks through creating a seamless rope pattern in Photoshop and then applying it along a vector path in Illustrator.

LUTs in Lightroom Are More Powerful Than You Think (Especially With a Profile Intensity Slider)
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LUTs in Lightroom Are More Powerful Than You Think (Especially With a Profile Intensity Slider)

If you do any volume of editing, you have probably felt the friction of applying a LUT-based look to still photos. LUTs live comfortably in Premiere and DaVinci, but getting them to behave inside Lightroom has historically required workarounds that feel more like duct tape than a real system. That problem gets worse when you work with clients who want their product photography and video content to feel like they came from the same shoot.

Building a Timeless Lightroom Preset from Scratch: A Step-by-Step Breakdown
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Building a Timeless Lightroom Preset from Scratch: A Step-by-Step Breakdown

There’s a specific kind of frustration I know well: you’ve shot a great set of portraits, the lighting is solid, the composition is clean, and then you spend 45 minutes in Lightroom pushing the same six sliders around until something feels almost right. Multiply that by a client gallery of 200 images and you’ve just lost half a day to guesswork. What I’ve always wanted is a preset built on principles, not trends – something I can actually understand, modify, and trust across different lighting conditions and subject types.

How to Create Custom Adjustment Layer Presets in Photoshop (February 2024 Update)
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How to Create Custom Adjustment Layer Presets in Photoshop (February 2024 Update)

If you’ve been building Photoshop workflows for any length of time, you already know that adjustment layers are the backbone of non-destructive editing. Brightness, contrast, curves, hue and saturation - these are the tools that do the heavy lifting on nearly every image I process, whether it’s a single hero shot for an ad campaign or a batch of 300 e-commerce frames. The problem, until very recently, was that the preset system inside the Adjustments panel was a one-way street.