Skies are often under-rated. The vast majority of the times, the skies are only “good” during the sunrise or the sunset. The problem is that the vast majority of the photos are not taken at sunrise or sunset. That’s why in the 1980s, the color polarizing filters were popular, just like HDR is today.

In Lightroom, the common recommendation is to use the graduated filter to darken the skies …

Everybody uses the Exposure slider to make their photo lighter or darker. Then the problems starts, what to do with the recovery, fill… The problems are due to Adobe’s “poor documentation”. I will attempt to clarify.

The recovery slider works best with RAW photos. It will still work with JPEG photos, but not as well.

Differences between Exposure and Recovery

Some people are very good at making decisions and at sticking to them. These people immediately decide on some keywords and that’s it, no more changes. I can’t. I often have to go back to add more keywords, to change some keywords or even to delete some keywords. Lightroom does not have an automatic way of changing, rearranging and reorganizing keywords, but it is only a 2 step …

Everybody is bashing Costco because their prints are cheap. I use Costco, not by choice but by necessity. I have a custom lab, but anything as next day service is very expensive and same day service, we are not talking 1 hour service here, cost an arm and a leg ($39 for one 5” by 7”.) I could print my own but I can never get it right on the …

Whenever somebody complains that their photos do not look “right”, the “Mr Know-It-All” will always give the same answer:

Hey, idiot! Why are you asking that dumb question? Obviously, you didn’t calibrate your hellip;

Just add the word monitor, printer…

Does calibration help? Yes, but not as much as you think, the problem is that it’s almost impossible to match colors over different mediums. You can say and …

Lightroom has this wonderful concept of the virtual copy. A virtual copy is just a set of adjustments that is stored in the catalog, it’s not an actual file. The beauty of the virtual copies is that it’s possible to have hundreds of virtual copies of the same photo but with different adjustments, crops, colours, black and white…

Some people are amazing, years later, they remember every single …

When marking a photo with a Reject Photo or pressing the Delete key, Lightroom only deletes that photo from that collection. But what about the other collections and what about really deleting that photo?

1. The hard way? Switch to the collection All Photographs, you will keep your position and Lightroom will highlight the photo that you want to delete and press the Delete key.
2. The easy way? Stay where you …

Adobe created the DNG format: Digital NeGative, we are at version 1.3. According to Adobe:

Key benefits for photographers:

• DNG format helps promote archival confidence, since digital-imaging software solutions will be able to open raw files more easily in the future.
• A single raw processing solution enables a more efficient workflow when handling raw files from multiple camera models and manufacturers.
• A publicly documented and readily available specification can …

Lightroom uses the SQLite database as it’s software for storing most of the information. Remember that Lightroom doesn’t change any photo, instead Lightroom stores all its steps in the SQLite database.

Depending on how you have set your catalog configuration, when you have set the backup of the catalog, Lightroom will optimize the catalog.

But you can optimize your catalog manually from the File menu. The question is …

Usually, when importing photos into a Lightroom catalog, the Do No Import Duplicates is checked on. The question is what’s a duplicate? Everybody in their right mind would assume that 2 duplicate photos are 2 identical photos. It turns out that for programmers, 2 identical photos are not the same as 2 identical files.

What Lightroom really mean is 2 identical files. What are identical files?

• The same name …

Rename a Lightroom catalog is easy, it’s simply renaming 1 (one) file and that’s it. The problems is where is the catalog located? Why hasn’t Adobe provided a menu function for renaming the catalog?

• The catalog is named (the catalog name).lrcat

So you have a few choices for finding the catalog:

1. Do a straight search from the OS (Windows or Mac) and look for: (the catalog …