Videos And Articles
Smart Collections: Let Lightroom Organize Photos for You
A regular Collection lets you choose which photographs you want to see together. A Smart Collection works differently. You describe the photographs using criteria such as ratings, keywords, location information, or camera metadata, and Lightroom Classic gathers the photographs that match.
The real advantage is that the group isn't static. As photographs enter the catalog or their metadata changes, they can automatically appear in or disappear from a Smart Collection. The rules keep working as the catalog changes.
Photographing Big Sur and the Monterey Peninsula: Ten Areas and How to Approach Them
Big Sur and the Monterey Peninsula are often treated as one photography destination, but the coast changes character from Pacific Grove to McWay Falls. Some areas reward an early start, others need a patient evening, and several are at their best when you slow down and work with the light you have.
This guide covers ten broader areas from the Monterey Peninsula south through Big Sur, with practical ideas for timing, composition, access, and safety. It is based on spring and early-summer visits across several years, so the emphasis is on how I approached these places rather than a promise of perfect conditions.
How I Decide What a Landscape Photo Needs Before Editing
You open a raw landscape photo and see plenty of things you could adjust. How do you decide what the photograph actually needs?
Using an unprocessed Sweet Creek image, I work through the decisions that come before the sliders: finding the subject, choosing a crop, and deciding how light and contrast can guide the viewer’s eye.
Lightroom Folders and Collections Solve Different Problems
Folders and Collections can both look like ways to organize photographs in Lightroom Classic, but they solve different problems. Folders describe where the original photographs physically live. Collections let you bring photographs together without changing that physical organization.
That becomes especially useful when a gallery, project, subject, or other body of work includes photographs stored in many different folders. Collections give you another way to see those photographs together while leaving the originals exactly where they belong.
Make Artificial Lights Glow Naturally in Luminar
A cityscape can have plenty of bright lamps and still feel a little flat. Luminar Magic Light tool can bring more atmosphere to those artificial light sources, but applying the same glow everywhere may pull attention away from the parts of the photograph that matter most.
The useful decision is where to let the light shine and where to hold it back. A modest starting adjustment, followed by a few selective changes, can give the scene more life while keeping its lighting believable.
Should You Rename Your Photos When You Import Them?
A Lightroom folder structure doesn't need to account for every date, location, subject, or shoot with another level of folders. Organizing photographs into dated folders is especially common, but unless dates are how you naturally look for your photographs, that extra structure may not be helping you. Too much structure can make a photo library harder to understand rather than easier.
I keep all of my photographs beneath one top-level folder, then use a relatively shallow hierarchy underneath it. Different types of photography can follow different organizational logic. The important thing is that the structure matches how you naturally think about and look for your photographs.
A Simple Lightroom Folder Structure That Can Grow With You
A Lightroom folder structure doesn't need to account for every date, location, subject, or shoot with another level of folders. Organizing photographs into dated folders is especially common, but unless dates are how you naturally look for your photographs, that extra structure may not be helping you. Too much structure can make a photo library harder to understand rather than easier.
I keep all of my photographs beneath one top-level folder, then use a relatively shallow hierarchy underneath it. Different types of photography can follow different organizational logic. The important thing is that the structure matches how you naturally think about and look for your photographs.
Photographing Acadia in Autumn: A Practical Guide to Coast, Ponds, and Mountain Light
Acadia National Park rewards photographers who slow down. During my October visits, I found everything from predawn coastal color and moving surf to reflective ponds, wooded carriage roads, and late-day mountain light.
This guide organizes those experiences into a practical rhythm for an autumn photography day. It explains where I found the strongest visual possibilities, how the light shaped each area, and what to consider before committing to a sunrise, midday walk, or sunset destination.
How to Apply Tack Sharp Selectively in ON1 Photo RAW
Tack Sharp can correct camera shake remarkably well, but applying it across an entire photograph can sharpen areas you intentionally want to keep soft. Water, reflections, and moving subjects can quickly lose their natural character.
By combining Tack Sharp with layers and masks in ON1 Photo RAW, you can correct softness selectively. This approach preserves intentional motion while sharpening the stationary parts of the scene that need help.
One Lightroom Catalog or Several? How to Decide
For me, one catalog works best because I want a single place for all of my photography, both personal and professional. I can still organize those parts of my library differently without separating them into completely different catalogs.
Start Your Lightroom Photo Organization With the End in Mind
Organizing a Lightroom catalog can quickly become an exercise in folders, keywords, ratings, and metadata. Before deciding how to use those tools, step back and ask a more important question: What do you eventually want to do with your photographs?
A useful workflow begins with those goals. Once you understand how you want to find, revisit, and share your photographs, you can build a Lightroom system that supports the way you actually think and work.
Create a Dreamy Landscape Look with Luminar's Mystical Tool
A dreamy, soft look can be a beautiful way to finish a landscape photograph, but applying that softness everywhere can work against the image. The challenge is deciding where you want the viewer to feel softness and where you want them to see texture and detail.
In this article, I look at a practical way to use Luminar's Mystical tool selectively, keeping the mist and sky soft while preserving the crisp, textured character of the mountains. The result is more than a softer photograph—it creates another kind of contrast that can help direct attention through the image.