How To Make A Sunshine Glow In Lightroom
I often turn to tools outside of Lightroom to add glow and sunshine effects. However, there are some adjustments you can make right inside Lightroom to create a sunshine glow look. A mix of temperature, clarity, and texture can produce a softer, diffused look for your images.
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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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
A photo workflow can fall apart when you cannot tell what has been finished and what still needs attention. That becomes especially frustrating when photographs from the same shoot are at different stages.
My six-step Lightroom Classic workflow uses color labels to give every photograph a clear next action. Whether a photo needs rating, location information, keywords, developing, or sharing, I can see where I left off and continue without retracing my steps.