Backup Your Lightroom Catalog Immediately
It is very important to backup your Lightroom catalog in addition to your photos. In this short video, I show you how to trigger an on demand backup of your Lightroom catalog. When I complete a large amount of catalog work, such as creating new collections and adding metadata to my photos, I want to make sure my Lightroom catalog is backed up.
PHOTO GEAR I USE
- Sony A7Rii
- Sony FE 16-35mm F4 ZA OSS
- Sony FE 24-70mm F4 ZA OSS
- Sony FE 70-200mm F4 G OSS
- Really Right Stuff Tripod
- Formatt-Hitech Filters
- MindShift Camera Bags
The entire list is in The Gear Box.
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.
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.
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.
Snow in shadow often picks up a strong blue color cast. Some blue belongs there—the area is in shadow, after all—but too much can overwhelm the photograph.
In this video, I’ll show you how I use a targeted Lightroom mask to reduce that blue cast while preserving the depth and shadow in the mountains. The same approach can help with many other color-cast problems in landscape photography.
Sometimes you commit to a landscape composition, but the moving elements never come together perfectly in a single frame. The best wave might be in one photo, while another has better texture or movement elsewhere in the scene.
In this video, I’ll show you how I selected three seascape photos and blended their strongest elements using simple layers and masks in Photoshop. The masking is straightforward, and the same idea works in any editing software that supports layers.
Have you ever subtracted an object from a Lightroom mask, only to find a thin ridge left behind around the selection? Cleaning that up usually means reaching for the Brush tool and carefully painting along the edge.
Lightroom Classic’s new Feather and Edge controls give you a faster way to soften, expand, or contract many AI-generated masks. In this video, I’ll explain how the controls work, which masking tools support them, and where Edge is already saving me cleanup time.
What happens when Lightroom’s AI landscape masking doesn’t recognize the subject you want to edit? Sometimes, the missing selection is exactly what you need.
In this video, I combine Lightroom’s vegetation and mountain masks with inversion, subtraction, and a radial gradient to isolate the architecture at Machu Picchu. The result adds depth to the scene and guides attention without requiring painstaking brushwork.
A vignette can help guide the viewer toward your subject, but lowering exposure around the edges of a black and white photo can quickly bury important shadow detail.
In this quick tutorial, I’ll show you a more controlled approach using a radial gradient and the Whites or Highlights slider. You’ll still get that visual nudge toward the subject without making already-dark areas disappear.
What do you do when the weather is dull, the surf is uninteresting, and a dead battery takes away one of the tools you normally rely on?
You can spend the outing wishing conditions were different—or let those constraints narrow your choices and point you toward another photograph. In this video, I share how I adapted during a recent seascape outing and why limitations can sometimes give your photography clearer direction.
Scott Davenport
Scott Davenport is a landscape photographer and photo educator and based in San Diego, California. He leads photo workshops, writes photo books, hosts podcasts, makes tutorial videos, and feels weird referring to himself in the 3rd person.
He also can't help getting his feet wet photographing at the beach.
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.