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Watch: How to get super clean images when shooting high ISO raw files

The ISO capabilities in DSLRs and mirrorless cameras today is pretty amazing. But it’s not perfect. You’re still going to see an increase in noise as you ramp up the ISO, even if it’s not quite as bad as it used to be. But we all love clean, noiseless images, don’t we? Along with the improvements in ISO performance, we’ve also seen big leaps in noise reduction technology. But many of them still aren’t perfect, often eliminating noise at the expense of detail.

For some images, you really do need to keep that detail and in this video from Scott Walker at Walks on the Wild Side, we learn three different methods of noise reduction. These methods include simple Lightroom Edits, Topaz Denoise AI and a pretty complex method that’s very involved but “fixes everything”. He also covers a “Pre-noise reduction” process you can do before you bring your photo into 3rd party software.

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How to shoot & edit your woodland photos to give them a glowy, dreamlike, painterly look

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The real world, especially the natural real world, is filled with wonderful sights for us to capture with our cameras. The problem is, our cameras rarely capture the world exactly as we see it and particularly not how we feel it to be. That’s where editing comes in. It’s why we have tools like Lightroom and Photoshop to help us get our images where we want them to be. In the case of woodlands, that often means a dreamy painterly style.

Woodlands, particularly, are well suited to this style. It brings out those magical and mystical vibes many of us feel when we think of woodlands and the idyllic images we see in our heads. In this video, Nigel Danson walks us through his editing process in Lightroom Classic to give his woodland photos that soft and dreamy painterly feel. But this isn’t just a basic 5-minute tutorial. It’s almost half an hour long going into a lot of detail on the whole process.

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Adobe makes masking in Lightroom easier than ever with new AI tools

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If you ask me, masking is one of the most tedious things to do while editing photos. But Adobe has launched a few new tools that will make it simpler and easier than ever. They’re coming to Lightroom soon, so if this is your preferred editor like it is mine, you’ll love the new features that will make editing much faster.

All of the tools are AI-powered as it’s been all the rage lately. But my snarky comments aside, Adobe’s new masking tools seem quite useful. There are a few more interface improvements coming soon too, so let’s check what’s new and what you can expect.

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How to change the colour of anything in Lightroom in just a few seconds

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There was a time when if you wanted to change the colour of an object in a photograph, you had to load up Photoshop in order to do it. But these days, there are a lot more options out there. And now, even Lightroom is getting in on the action, thanks to the recently added AI selection tools that let you target specific subjects within a photograph and do pretty much whatever you want to them.

In this video, Aaron from Phlearn shows us exactly how we can use those AI selection tools to pick out our subject and then isolate the dress they’re wearing to completely change the colour of it, non-destructively, before you’ve even thought about bringing it into Photoshop.

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How to clear sensor dust in Lightroom in multiple photos at once

Even if you rarely change your lenses, you’ll end up with some dust on your sensor. Naturally, it will be visible in your photos, and let’s face it, we normally see the sensor dust only when we’re already done shooting.

Thankfully, this can be resolved in post. Although it sounds like a tedious job to remove all those little specks of dust, there’s a neat trick that will speed it up immensely. Micael Widell shares it in his latest video, so let’s check it out, along with some bonus tips from me.

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Adobe Lightroom for desktop and mobile finally gets video editing features

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Now, I know, you just read the title and thought “Woah!” but before you get too excited, we’re not talking editing features like Premiere Pro or Rush here. We’re talking about a similar type of editing capability to those which you get with still images in Lightroom. Except, you can also trim the in and out points of the video, too, to make those short social media clips.

But yes, Adobe has today announced that Lightroom for both desktop and mobile now has video editing capabilities. Given what I said above, this basically means you get access to presets and slider adjustments along with many of the AI-powered features as well as trimming. Lightroom also sees some other new features, including a Preset Amount slider to dial things back a bit, Adaptive Presets and more.

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This Ultimate Guide to Lightroom’s Smart Previews helps you edit on the road without external storage

If you edit on a laptop, particularly if you’re regularly travelling and using an external hard drive to store your images, you’ll know what a pain it can sometimes be to carry those external drives around with you, let alone hook them up on a whim – like, when you’re travelling on a plane or a train, for example. But without connecting them, you can’t edit your images. Lightroom simply won’t let you. Or will it?

In this video, Anthony Morganti gives us the solution with his “Ultimate Guide” to using Smart Previews within Lightroom. Smart Previews essentially allow you to keep editing your images even when the device on which the original image files are contained is not connected to your computer. Very handy if you’re often travelling and don’t always have the ability to plug in your external storage.

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5 ways that Capture One might be better than Lightroom

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Which RAW editor and photo management software do you use? There are a few different options out there and many of them have had some significant updates recently. Perhaps using the same one you have always used is a good thing, but equally, perhaps looking around to see what other options there are could also be a good idea to see if something else might serve you better.

In this video, Rob Hall goes over 5 different reasons that Capture One might be a better fit for you and your workflow than Lightroom.

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How to use Lightroom CC’s Color Grading feature to get the most out of your raw files

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Lightroom started to overhaul its Lightroom CC UI in around October 2020, switching the old split toning feature into a new Color Grading feature with more video editing style colour wheels rather than basic sliders and a standard colour picker. But it’s a feature that still confuses some Lightroom users who have only ever dealt with the previous split toning feature and have never worked with video before.

The Colour Grading feature does the same thing that the Split Toning tool did, except it lets you do a lot more, too, and it lets you do it a bit more intuitively. In this video, Kevin Raposo walks us through the settings and details of the Color Grading feature to show us how the feature works and how we can use it to enhance and improve our images.

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If you’re using an old perpetual license version of Lightroom 5, back up your installation file

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A recent post on Reddit has highlighted a potential issue for users of Adobe’s perpetual license version of Lightroom 5. Basically, if you bought the digital-only version and don’t have a physical CD from which to install (or you do but you’re using a computer that no longer possesses an optical drive), you may not be able to easily download the installation files again if you ever need to reinstall it on your computer.

Previously, you could download older versions of the software for which you had a valid license and the Reddit user pdaphone says that when they logged in, they could see their serial number, but was unable to download the software through the Adobe interface. Fortunately, it seems like there is a solution. At least for now.

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