I’m up here with my dear friends (and KelbyOne Instructors) Mimo Meidany and Dave Williams, doing a hands-on travel photography workshop for 12 photographers from the US and UK, and we are already having a ball.

ABOVE: That’s Mimo, me, and Dave somewhere in Lofoten.

Yesterday and today, we have just been scouting locations all over Lofoten for the workshop. Then, the workshop kicks off tomorrow night at a great local restaurant where we’ll have a tasty dinner as a group and lots of wine, then we’ll give our first official briefing for the next day’s shooting adventure. I just cannot wait! This place is just otherworldly. Indescribable beauty (right now, there is a little bit of rain, too – but with any luck, it will have mostly moved on by tomorrow afternoon. At least, that’s what we’re hoping).

So, not much Lightroom stuff to share today, so I’m hoping Rob will sweep in and save the day with this column (as he so often does), but I just wanted to say hi to everybody and here’s wishing you a week of great images, no matter where you are.

-Scott

The post Howdy, From Norway’s Lofoten Islands! appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

Super handy stuff – the masking tools are a real game-changer. Thanks, Terry.

Have a great Monday, ya’ll.

-Scott

The post Using Lightroom’s Masking Tools for Adjusting Clothes and Facial Hair appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

She. Is. Awesome, and her courses are brilliant! Here’s a link to her 12 (that’s right, twelve) full-length KelbyOne courses. You can buy any one of them for $29 or join, become a member, and watch them all).

Thanks, and have a great weekend, everybody (and yes, football is back!).

-Scott

The post Awesome Video on Enhancing Portraits in Lightroom appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

Let me know if you agree, disagree, or if you’re dealing with noise in a different way, etc., down in the comments.

The Photoshop World Conference 2024 is coming up next month!

It’s back again on Sept. 24-26, 20204, and it’s three full days, multiple training tracks, all online, featuring your favorite Photoshop World instructors and the Photoshop World experience, complete with an opening keynote, the attendee party, the Guru Awards — the whole nine yards and it’s going to be awesome! Don’t miss out – register now and save a ton on your ticket. Go to PhotoshopWorld.com and save your spot for the Lightroom, Photoshop and Photography online event of the year.

Have a great week everybody – I’m taking a few days to take my awesome wifey on a trip to celebrate her birthday, but I’ll be back shortly (well, if all goes well. LOL!). Have a great week!

-Scott

The post Some Straight Talk About High ISO Noise (and dealing with it) appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

If you do regular backups of your catalog (and I’m hoping you do when you see that dialog above, which appears when you quit Lightroom Classic), it will make a COPY of your entire catalog. Each time you hit that ‘Back up,’ it makes yet another backup copy. Sure, it compresses that backup quite a bit, but still…those backups can get really large in file size. Worse yet, after a couple of weeks, they’re so outdated that those older ones become useless anyway.

If you did wind up with a corrupt catalog (rare, but it can happen), you would restore from your most recent backup, right? So, what are you doing with all those old updates from months ago, years ago? Nothing. They’re just eating up space for no reason, and that’s why today, Friday, is the perfect day to “Delete your old Lightroom backup catalogs.”

Look inside your Lightroom folder (the one where your catalog(s) are stored) (mine was inside my Pictures folder on my Mac), and look for a folder named “Backups.” Inside that folder, see if you don’t have a whole bunch of backups that are way out of date (as seen above) and just eating up hard drive space for no reason.

If you don’t see a folder named ‘Backups,’ that’s because you don’t have any backups (ack!), so if disaster strikes (your catalog gets corrupted), you will be starting over from scratch in Lightroom. For more information on backing up your catalog, check out this article we did on backing up your catalog (why you should and how to do it), and hit this link.

I still had some old backups from June of 2023 hanging around. If somehow my catalog got corrupted, I would want to use a backup from Late July of 2024—not one from a year ago and so on. So those outdated backups are doing just one thing—eating up space. Now’s the time to pitch ’em, seeing as it’s ‘Delete Your Old Catalog Backups’ Friday!

I hope that this process frees up some space for you. If you looked in your Lightroom folder and didn’t even see a folder named ‘Backups,’ maybe it made you quit Lightroom. Then go and hit that ‘Make Backup’ button so you at least have one on hand in case disaster strikes.

Here’s wishing you a “Football’s almost here” type of weekend!

-Scott

The post It’s ‘Delete Your Old Lightroom Backup Catalogs” Friday! appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

Above: Here’s the image we’re going to work on, and while there are a number of things I would probably remove along that left wall, I’m mostly concerned with that bright spot at the bottom of the stairs, right in front of the vase (it looks like a light beaming through kind of a crescent-shaped opening.

STEP ONE: We head to the Develop Module and I’m going to zoom in tight on the area we’re working on. Next, I click on the Remove Tool in the toolbar (it’s shown as circled here in red. Its icon looks like an eraser). Then, I painted over the bright spot with the tool, as seen above).

STEP TWO: And here is the result, which is pretty bad, but that’s often what you get with this tool (at least, that’s been my experience. Sometimes, it works pretty well, as long as what you’re removing is really simple, but it really falls down on more complicated fixes.

OK, let’s hit “undo” (Command-Z on Mac, Ctrl-Z on Windows) and try again, but this time, we’re going to turn on the Generative AI checkbox (as seen circled above in red).

STEP THREE: With Generative AI turned on, you use the tool like you always would, so I just painted over the bright spot again (as seen above). Now click the ‘Apply’ button to let it do its thing.

Above: After a few seconds, here’s the first result. I say “first” because it gives you three options. The first result is pretty darn good.

Above: To see one of the other results (called ‘Variations’), click the left and right arrow buttons in the Remove panel (circled here in red). I usually find that the 2nd or 3rd variation looks best, but every once in a while, #1 wins out. That’s why it’s important to view all three.

You can clearly see how vastly better this new AI feature makes the removal process, so I leave that checkbox on all the time—I don’t see any reason to go to the “worse result” version of the tool. High-five to Adobe for bringing this to Lightroom. It’s a game-changer when it comes to removing distractions.

Travel Photographers: How to Shoot Like a Pro On Your Next Vacation

We just released a brand new course on how to shoot travel photography like a pro, and we shot the entire course on location in beautiful Santorini, Greece (even though it’s shot in Santorini, the techniques are not about shooting in Greece – you’d apply these same techniques no matter where your travels take you. Check out the official trailer below (it’s just 60-seconds, but you’ll get the idea):

You can buy the course for $29 or watch it and all our other courses on travel photography (and everything else, including a ton of courses on Lightroom) by becoming a KelbyOne member for just $20 a month (cancel anytime and it’s 100% money-back guaranteed!).

Here’s the link to the course.

That’s it for today – hope you have an awesome Monday!

-Scott

The post Does Lightroom’s Remove Tool’s Generative AI Feature Really Make a Big Difference? appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

Told ya it was short (and sweet), and I hope it was helpful.

Have a great weekend, everybody!

-Scott

The post Great Little One-Minute Video For Help in Setting Your White Balance appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

Once you choose the Brush tool (click the Masking icon, and from the pop-down list of tools, click on ‘Brush’), the Brush cursor (as seen above) shows you the actual size of the brush (the smaller circle inside). The larger outer circle shows the amount of feathering [edge softening] applied to your brush. When you see a big gap between the larger outer and inner circles, you have a lot of feathering applied (it’s a soft-edged brush). If the two circles are very close together, it’s a harder-edged brush.

Above: To shrink the size of the brush (the feathering amount moves in tandem with it), press the left bracket key on your keyboard ( [ ) to shrink the brush size and the right bracket key ( ] ) to make the brush size larger (these keys are just to the right of the letter “P” on a standard QWERTY keyboard).

Above: If you want to leave the brush size as is but change the amount of feathering (as seen above), hold the Shift key and use the same left and right bracket keys.

Above: You know that Edit Pins that appear on screen when you paint over an area? Well, you have some options over how they appear.

First, you can show/hide them by pressing Command-H (on Mac) or Ctrl-H on Windows. Next, in the left corner of the options bar along the bottom of your image, there’s an option which lets you choose when the edit pins appear.

Always: (the one with the checkbox, shown here) means the pins are always visible, even when your cursor isn’t over the image.

Auto: your Edit Pins automatically hide when your cursors moves away from the image area, so if you move your cursor over to move any of the Adjustment Brush sliders, they auto-hide.

Selected: It only shows the pin you’re currently working on and hides the others. This is a pretty decent choice because once you’re working on a different pin, why do you need to see the others all the time? Sometimes, you might, but not usually.

Never: This one is kinda obvious. It never shows the Edit pins.

Above: One more — if you want to see the area you painted over (the mask), you can either:

(a) Move your cursor over the active pin, and it will display the mask as a red tint, as seen above.

(b) Press the letter “O” on your keyboard, and it keeps the mask turned on (like you see above) so you can see the mask as you paint.

Here’s a helpful little one-minute video I did a while back (when the Brush tool was still called “The Adjustment Brush”), where you’ll get to see some of the tips you just learned here in action, but there’s also a tip in there for folks using Lightroom on a laptop that is really helpful. Check it out below:

OK, I hope you find one or more of those helpful. Have a great Monday, everybody!

–Scott

P.S. BONUS TIP: If you’re using Lightroom Classic and you hold the Option Key (on Mac or the Alt key on PC), it switches you to the Erase brush, which is handy if you’re painting and you spill over onto an area you didn’t mean to paint on – you can just brush that spill away while holding that key down.

The post Tips For Using Lightroom’s Masking Brush appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

This process is way easier than you might think, and I’ll take you step-by-step through the process (again, much easier than you’d think). Here goes:

STEP ONE: Once you’re back from your trip, and you’re done with sorting and editing your images on your laptop, right-click (Mac: Ctrl-click) on the Collection (or, in my case, the Collection Set) you made during your trip and from the pop-up menu that appears, choose “Export this Collection Set as a Catalog” as shown above. Of course, if you created a Collection rather than a Collection Set, it would read “Export this Collection as a Catalog” instead. If you work in Folders rather than Collections, it would say, “Export this Folder…” and so on.

STEP TWO: This brings up a dialog box asking where you want to save this newly exported catalog. At this point, I would plug in an external hard drive and save it to that hard drive. If you don’t have an external hard drive, you could save it to Dropbox, iCloud, or a cloud-based storage service instead.

At the bottom of the window are checkboxes for some options, the most important being “Export negative files.” Turn that on! Turning on that checkbox includes a copy of your actual images, which is important — otherwise, all you’d be moving to your home computer would be the thumbnail previews. You want the RAW (and/or JPEG) files to be copied over to your home computer as well. Now click the Export Catalog button (as shown here).

STEP THREE: Here’s a look inside the folder created when you exported that Collection Set as a Catalog. It’s the Preview file, the Catalog file itself, and a folder named “Pictures” with all the Images that were in that Collection Set you edited on your laptop. These are all saved to your external hard drive (or cloud service if you choose to go that route instead).

STEP FOUR: Now eject that external hard drive from your laptop and plug it into your home computer (in my case, it’s an iMac). Then go under Lightroom’s File Menu and choose Import from Another Catalog (as shown here).

STEP FIVE: This brings up a standard “open” dialog, so navigate your way to have that folder on your external hard drive with your exported catalog. Now choose that Catalog file (not the previews, not the Pictures folder; the one that ends with the file extension .lrcat), and open that catalog. That brings up the Import window, and the important thing to do here is go to the File Handling pop-up menu (seen above). Choose ‘Copy new photos to a new location and import’, then click the Choose button right below that and choose where you want these images from your laptop to be stored (in my case, they are photos from China, so they’d go inside my Travel Folder on my Synology NAS storage unit at my house).

Now click the Import button, and you’re done. Your images will copy to wherever you choose, and this Collection Set (or Collection or Folder, depending on what you chose) will now appear in your Collections panel (or Folder panel), just as if you had created it there from the start. All the sorting and editing you did on your laptop will still be intact.

NOTE: If you used Dropbox or iCloud instead of a hard drive, the process is the same; just choose to import the catalog from Dropbox or iCloud, etc., instead of from your External Hard Drive.

There you have it. Basically, you export a collection from your laptop and then reimport it on your home computer, and it adds it there as if you created it there in the first place.

I hope you found that helpful, and here’s wishing you a super relaxing weekend.

-Scott

The post Travel Photographers: Moving Your Lightroom Classic Edits From Your Laptop To Your Computer At Home appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

So, in the spirit of “Backup Your Photos Monday,” I thought I’d share how I make a backup of my backup external hard.

To keep my backup hard drive synced with my 2nd backup hard drive it’s a simple two-step process thanks to a software utility I use called “Carbon Copy Cloner.” It’s a Mac-only application, but a popular alternative for Windows (which does the same thing) is Acronis True Image, and it also offers a cloud-backup option, which is nice. (If you need more Windows alternatives, including free options, check out this article).

Here’s how it works:

STEP ONE: You plug in both of your external hard drives (in this case, my Photo Backup 1 and Photo Backup 2) and launch Carbon Copy Cloner. A window appears, and a bar displaying any available drives appears (seen above). You click on a Source drive (which external hard drive you want to copy) and then click on a Destination (which external drive you want to copy to) (as seen above).

Step Two: It’s very visual and clear what’s going to happen. You can see my Source is Photo Backup 1, and I’m copying any files that have changed since my last backup to Photo Backup 2. Once it’s clear that it’s set up correctly, click the Clone button, and it makes an exact duplicate (a clone of your first external hard drive). That’s it.

You can set up a schedule to do all this (that’s what I do) — it can send you reminder emails or just automatically backup any time you plug in your Photo Backup 2. It’s got some nice options, and it’s super easy to use, which I love.

Tons of Lightroom Classes Coming Up At the “Photoshop World Conference 2024”

It’s back again this September, and it’s three full days, multiple training tracks, all online, featuring your favorite Photoshop World instructors and the Photoshop World experience, complete with an opening keynote, Midnight Madness, the attendee party, the Guru Awards — the whole nine yards and it is going to be awesome! Tickets are available now; if you sign up now, you save a bunch! Check it all out at photoshopworld.com

Here’s wishing you a great backed-up feelin’ Monday!

-Scott

The post It’s “Back Up Your Photos” Monday (and How To Make a Back Up Of Your Backup) appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.