A Magic Photo Pop Using Curves In Lightroom Masks
Recently Adobe added Curves to the set of adjustments available in Lightroom masking. And it’s great. The power of curves - localized to a specific area of your image. Pairing these two controls gives you an amazing amount of control over the tones in your image.
Curves in masks also opens up a host of potential for presets. I made a finishing preset to add a finishing pop to my images leveraging curves and luminance range masks. Here is a before/after of using this preset. The change is subtle yet helpful.
Before the Overlay Pop preset
After the Overlay Pop preset
Download the ‘Overlay Pop’ preset featured in this video.
La Jolla Black & White May 13 2023
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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.