Sometimes we choose not to use a polarizer in the field (or we forget to bring one!) and then our landscape photos have too much glare and shine in them. The Dehaze slider will help you out. Use the Dehaze slider with your masking tools and target the reduction in glare to just the elements that need them.
In this photo, I purposely chose to keep the glare while I was capturing the image. Back in the studio, I realized I needed to tone it down some. Dehaze to the rescue! It’s very straightforward:
Add a gradient mask (or another shape) and use a luminance range mask to target just the area that needs glare reduction. Hint, hint - it’s not the shadows!
Increase the Dehaze slider to reduce the glare. Don’t over-compensate and keep your eye out for color casts. Too much Dehaze can add awkward colors.
Visit the Texture and Clarity sliders, too. A boost to those often helps restore richness to areas that were dulled by glare.
Use a mask to target only the areas needing glare reduction.
Before the glare reduction
After the glare reduction
Ghosts Of Hospitals Reef
Contact Scott to commission a print or license this image.
Organizing a photograph and making it searchable are important parts of asset management, but they aren't the end of the photograph's journey. The strongest images still need the creative attention that turns a RAW file into a finished photograph and prepares it for an audience.
Developing, preparing an output, sharing, and marking the work complete are four distinct decisions. Keeping those decisions inside the workflow helps you know what each photograph needs next without treating an exported file as a replacement for the original.
Every photograph I import receives some initial attention, but that doesn't mean every photograph needs the same amount of work. Rating, stacking, and adding shared location information can happen broadly and efficiently across a shoot.
As my workflow moves into keywording, developing, and sharing, I concentrate more effort on the best photographs from the shoot. This narrowing protects my time without deleting photographs, closing doors, or preventing me from reconsidering an image later.
A useful keyword hierarchy connects specific details to broader ideas. When you apply a keyword for a specific location, a particular lighthouse, or a birthday celebration, Lightroom Classic can also associate the photograph with the broader places, subjects, or events that contain it.
Synonyms extend that efficiency by connecting one keyword to alternate names, related terms, or other languages. A hierarchy can give you broader and narrower ways to search your own library. I use synonyms primarily to help other people and search engines find exported photographs without requiring me to enter every variation separately.
Keywording can make photographs easier to find, but it can also become an endless exercise in describing everything visible in every frame. You can keep the work manageable by asking one question: could Lightroom already find this photograph without the keyword?
The most useful keywords add information you cannot recover from capture data, ratings, location fields, or other existing metadata. That may be a subject, a familiar place name, a mood, a dominant color, or another idea you expect to search for later. The goal isn't to build the largest vocabulary possible. It is to add metadata that earns its keep.
Right after a shoot, you know where you made the photographs. A few years later, that may not be nearly as obvious. Adding location information while the shoot is still fresh gives you another durable way to find photographs and understand where they were made.
You don't need to type city, state, and country into every photograph. If the camera records GPS coordinates, much of the work is already done. A GPX track log or, when necessary, Lightroom Classic's Map module provides other ways to add the location. The goal isn't exhaustive geographic metadata. It's enough useful information that you won't have to reconstruct it later.
A group of photographs can belong together without every frame needing equal space in Lightroom Classic. Several variations of the same composition, panorama segments, exposure brackets, or a rapid burst can quickly fill Grid view with photographs you don't need to see individually all the time.
Stacks keep those related photographs together while letting one useful photograph represent the group. I use them so the other photographs remain available when I need them without adding unnecessary visual clutter to my catalog.
Lightroom Classic gives you five stars for rating photographs, but those stars aren't very useful if their meanings change from one shoot to another. A consistent system lets you know what a three-star or four-star photograph means without rethinking the definitions every time you rate a new group of photos.
My rating system ranges from photographs I keep primarily for sentimental reasons to photographs I consider strong enough to print. You don't need to use the same definitions I do. The important part is giving your ratings stable meanings you can apply consistently over time.
Lightroom Classic's Import dialog asks many of the same questions every time you bring in photos. Rather than rebuilding those settings for every import, you can save the choices that stay consistent in an import preset.
The preset doesn't eliminate the decisions that change from shoot to shoot. It gives you a reliable starting point, so you can concentrate on the source, destination, and other details that actually need your attention.
Lightroom Classic's Import dialog presents plenty of choices, but one of the most important decisions is straightforward: where are your photos now, and where do you want the original files to live after the import?
Copy, Move, and Add each handle the original files differently. Once you understand what happens to the physical files and what happens in the Lightroom catalog, choosing the right import method becomes much easier.
You remember the photograph, but not its filename, folder, or exact capture date. A large Lightroom Classic catalog can feel difficult to search when the only clues you have are fragments: a location, a subject, a rating, or perhaps the lens you used.
The Library Filter lets you combine those fragments and progressively narrow the catalog. The metadata added throughout a practical workflow creates several paths back to the same photograph—without requiring perfect metadata or a perfect memory.