The Lightroom HDR merge option has been around for a while, so how does it work and how does it compare to a dedicated HDR tool?
Lightroom reviews, tips and tutorials
Lightroom is Adobe's all-in-one photo organizing, RAW processing and editing tool. It can be used on its own or alongside Photoshop, which is designed for more complex editing and illustration work.
You can only get Lightroom as part of Adobe's various subscription plans. The Adobe Photography Plan page explains these in more detail.
There are now two versions of Lightroom, which makes things more complicated. Lightroom Classic CC is the more powerful 'traditional' version which use images stored locally on your computer. Lightroom CC is a newer, slimmed-down version that uses cloud-based storage where all your images are available everywhere. This Lightroom CC vs Lightroom Classic CC comparison explains the key differences.
How to change Lightroom’s default processing
The default processing for camera RAW files in Lightroom is a reasonable start but quite often you find yourself making the same adjustments time and time again for specific cameras. I get that particularly with my Fujifilm X30. It’s a few years old now and has a pretty small sensor that’s prone to noise, but […]
BAN adjustments in Lightroom (BAN – Basic And Necessary!)
There are a handful of basic tweaks you just know you’re going to want to apply to each image.
How to relight a scene in Lightroom
In photography, things don’t always come together as you’d want them to. Sometimes you get wonderful lighting but there’s no effective subject in front of the camera for bringing it out, and sometimes you’ve got a good subject but the lighting isn’t right. This is one of those situations. I thought the couple walking a […]
How many Virtual Copies do you have in Lightroom?
Virtual Copies are really useful. They let you try out a whole load of different processing variations on a single image without having to create new files, saving time and disk space in the process and keeping all your adjustments ‘editable’. But there are drawbacks too. One this that none of your edits are visible […]
Lightroom noise reduction and why you need it
If you never thought you’d need to pay attention to the Lightroom noise reduction settings, you might need to think again. Like a lot of photographers I shoot RAW files on the assumption I’m going to get better image quality by processing the images myself rather than leaving it to the in-camera JPEG processing. That’s fine […]
Shadow and Highlight recovery in Lightroom
It’s very easy to lose extreme shadow or highlight detail when you’re shooting high-contrast scenes, and that’s one of the reasons for shooting raw files – they contain additional highlight detail, especially, that you may be able to bring out during processing. Shadow and highlight recovery is not always possible, but I usually reckon that […]
Get better Lightroom HDR with the help of HDR Efex Pro
The Lightroom HDR tools built in are good in their way, but will only get you so far. Yes, you can boost the shadows, reduce the highlights, add some Clarity and Dehaze and maybe a graduated filter for the sky, but you can end up doing a lot of work only getting half way to the […]
How to synchronise photos with Lightroom and Creative Cloud
A lot of us are still getting used to the idea of subscription-based software, but one of the strongest reasons for choosing Lightroom Classic CC over Lightroom 6 (the ‘perpetual licence’ version) is its integration with Adobe’s Creative Cloud. You can manage photos on your laptop, add to them via a browser, edit them on […]
How to install Lightroom presets
Lightroom Classic has some powerful image enhancement tools, as fans will know, and the ability to apply and store editing presets. But as well as creating your own, you can get presets from all sorts of different places and they’re really easy to install – and here’s how you do it. 01 Free presets from […]