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This hidden Lightroom trick lets you systematically search for sensor dust in your photos

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Sensor dust can be an absolute pain sometimes. No matter how clean we try to keep our cameras, it just seems to creep in there when we least expect it – and often when it has the most impact on our shots.  There are tools in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw to let us clean it up, but we often have to zoom in and drag the image around, hoping that we find them all.

This neat trick from photographer Anthony Morganti makes this an easy systematic task with one simple keypress. I’ve been zooming and manually dragging images around in Adobe Camera Raw for years, and never knew I could do this. Now it’ll make cleaning up images a breeze.

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Lightroom will finally become faster as Adobe announces GPU-accelerated editing

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If there’s one thing most Lightroom users agree about, it’s that the program could use a speed boost. In its latest announcement, Adobe introduces GPU-accelerated editing in Lightroom Classic and Camera Raw. It should make the editing process smoother and make the programs faster and more responsive.

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Adobe finally adds Irix lens profile support the Adobe CC suite

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I’ve been a big fan of Irix lenses since I first had the chance to check out their then-new Irix 15mm f/2.4 in person at The Photography Show in 2016. Later in the year, they let me have a bit of a play with the Irix 11mm f/4 at Photokina later in the year. They’re both very impressive lenses.

The only potential issue with them, though, is that until recently, if you wanted lens profiles for these lenses in Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom, you needed to download them yourself and install them manually. Now, though, Adobe have officially added lens profiles to support these lenses to CC.

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This is how to make Profiles in the new Camera Raw & Lightroom

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Earlier this month, Adobe released a new “massive update” for Lightroom and Camera Raw. The update brought Sony A7III support, along with a few other new Canon & Panasonic cameras. This update wasn’t without issue, though, and a bug fix update was released a couple of days ago.

The update did add a new “Profiles” tab, though. It includes six new Adobe Raw profiles, a whole bunch of creative profiles and the ability to create your own. But that last bit is causing some people issues. They’re not entirely sure how it works. So, Josh Haftel at Adobe put out this video to explain it all.

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Take your photo’s colours to the next level with split toning

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I have kind of a love-hate relationship with split toning. I love the work I see others doing with it, but for me, it never really gives me what I want. I guess I need more practice. But Evan Ranft (formerly, Evan 5ps) has a handy little tutorial for dealing with split toning in Adobe Lightroom. The technique should work exactly the same way in Adobe Camera Raw, too.

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Photoshop CS6 gets Dehaze thanks to these handy free presets

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I’m one of those seemingly odd people who kept hold of CS6 after Adobe switched to its new subscription model. The reasons for it aren’t important, but I know I’m not alone. Every day I see questions online from people also still using CS6. While we have the advantage of not having to keep paying for software every month, there are disadvantages. The big one being we don’t get updates any more.

This means no Dehaze feature in Adobe Camera Raw. Although, it turns out that the raw engine for CS6 does actually support the feature. There’s just no slider for it. But now, there’s a set of free presets available to let you use Dehaze, thanks to Photoshop guru, Dave Cross. Last week I had the opportunity to help Dave test out the presets before release, and boy are they a welcome addition.

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Sunburn won’t be a problem for your photos this summer with this quick Photoshop technique

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Summer’s here, and with it comes sunburn and redness. This redness becomes particularly obvious in photographs. Sometimes, if it’s photographs of our friends, we’ll leave them looking like a lobster so we can make fun of them. But often it’s a client, or other subject that we actually want to be pleased with the way they look in the photograph.

Nathaniel Dodson of Tutvid is here with a very quick technique to help reduce or even completely remove the redness from such photographs. You might have to get a little tricky with multiple layers and masking for severely patchy sunburn. But, it’s a good and fast technique to start you off.

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and sometimes… It’s better not to use a flash

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Sometimes it’s good to get out and flex the old photography muscles by shooting a little differently to how you normally would. It keeps the soul young and the stops the boredom from creeping in.

This is exactly what I did a few weeks back when I had a client shoot come in, who wanted natural light, Dark beauty themed images. I myself love flash, I pretty much always use a flash whether shooting composite or location, but I wanted to take this small challenge on. The shoot was great, I got to shoot in Selby Abbey, such a beautiful place. The thing with buildings like that though is they are usually gloomy. So natural light plus large gloomy, gothic abbey equals some ninja like editing afterward. When shooting natural light I tend to underexpose and then bring back detail later in Camera Raw. I had no choice in the abbey but to shoot dark, I even had to raise my ISO (something I hate haha) but I like a challenge now and again when editing to realize the vision in my head. SO I will walk you through the steps it took me to get to the image above.

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