Category Archives: Adobe Lightroom

Photo Library / Lightroom Library Backup Guide

Hopefully I’m preaching to the converted when it comes to backing up your photo archive but I’ve been hearing a lot of digital horror stories lately including a wedding photographer that lost a weddings worth of photos and subsequently had to refund what I assume to be a very unhappy couple. To me this is insane, if your digital data has commercial value why would you not own a £100 backup drive? Back up is like insurance for the most part you don’t need it but when you do you’ll be thankful. There’s only been one occasion that I’ve had to rely on a backup, 5 years ago I upgraded my storage and with in 2 months one of my new drives died. It is not uncommon for new drives to fail, Google research shows that hard drives will either fail when they are very new as they were defective from the beginning or they will go on for years. Just because a drive is new does not mean you can slack off backing it up. If I had not backed up this little hard drive failure would still be a disaster story I would be telling now, fortunately it was just a mild inconvenience.

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More Adobe Lightroom tips you might not know

It’s been a little while since I’ve written some new hidden Lightroom tips. These tips are not aimed at the advanced or newbie user as they’re tips I’ve been told about, they’re not the kind of thing you would pick up exploring the software. These new tips include things like the magic of Match Total Exposures, revealing what area you have a selected with an Adjustment Brush, making fine adjustments with touching sliders and more. If you find these tips handy check out my other Lightroom articles which includes other tip articles here.

adobe lightroom tips

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Nine More Hidden Tips For Adobe Lightroom

This is a follow up post to my 5 Lightroom tips that I wrote a year and half ago. Lightroom is pretty intuitive for the most part but there are few things that are not so obvious. Every time I discover something that I can’t believe I did not know about I will always make a note of it so I can write about it later. If there is something you think I missed leave a comment below.

Lightroom 5 Tips

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Dealing With Missing Files / Folders and Working With External Hard drives in Lightroom Tutorial

One of the most common complaints I hear about Lightroom is that it looses links to photos. This usually comes about by user error and is not a problem with Lightroom itself. I for one have been using Lightroom since the first version six years ago and have never had a problem with unlinked files. Users that usually have these problems are working with external drives and to be fair I don’t use Lightroom with external storage as I have a desktop computer with four internal hard drives.

Adobe Lightroom 5 library

As a test eight months ago I imported a bunch of Lisa’s photos of Chester the cat to a USB memory stick, sometimes I plug the thumb drive in and other times I leave it unplugged, sometimes for months. Every time I plug the drive back in I am happy to report that the photos of Chester are safe and present in the library, this all worked even after the upgrade from Lightroom 4 to 5. If you follow the tips in this tutorial like me you should not have anymore problems with lost files in Lightroom.

If what learn more about how to use Lightroom you should take a look at one of my most popular posts: How To Organise Your Lightroom Library. I have also posted my Five Hidden Tips for Lightroom and How To Find Instagram Images In Lightroom.

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Filtering photos in Adobe Lightroom to just show Instagram pictures

I do like a bit of Instagram but one of the things that bugs me about it is once all your iPhone pictures have been imported into your Lightroom library there is no easy way of just viewing the Instagram photos… or so I thought. I always shoot photos with the standard iPhone camera then import them into Instagram. This means that one in five of my iPhone photos are processed with Instagram, and filtering them can be a bit of a pain.

Instagram montage

If your interested in more of my Lightroom tutorials check out my five hidden tips for Lightroom and how to organise a Lightroom Library posts.

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Organising a photo library with Lightroom

Having a well-organised photo library is essential, especially as your collection of photographs grows. I’ve had a few organisation schemes over the past 13 years and by a little trial and error I have found what works for me. The following advice is geared towards Lightroom, but the theory can be put into practice with any application that allows to you organise images into folders.

Folder Naming and Structure

lightroom filing system

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5 Lightroom tips (one for each year it has existed)

Update November 2012: Since writing these tips Lightroom 5 has been realised and I am happy to say all the tips below still work in Lightroom 5 and 4. The next two paragraphs might not be that relevant anymore so to get to the tips just click here.

Lightroom is Adobe’s flagship photo processing and organizing tool which celebrated its 5th birthday in February 2012 (I am a little late in posting this!). What better way can there be to celebrate this other than giving you my five top Lightroom tips? I started using it when it was version 1 with a G4 Power Book in April 2007. Its use is widespread amongst photographers now and I know fewer and fewer people using alternatives. I for one can’t image working without it. I don’t start up Photoshop anymore unless I want to combine two or more images or move things around in an image.

Lightroom 4 was released in March 2012 and one of the hottest features was the price drop. It’s now just £99 for the full version and £59 for the upgrade. I am pretty sure that when I got version 1 it was £250 or more. It’s one of the only things I really try and push on people that take my photography course is to get this software as it will make you life so much easier.

Read on if you want to get the low down on: Split toning, Target adjustment tool, Solo mode, Rejecting & Brush resizing

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