Lightroom

Camera Raw Just Got a Secret Photo Browser (And It Might Change How You Work)
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Camera Raw Just Got a Secret Photo Browser (And It Might Change How You Work)

I have a complicated relationship with Lightroom. Not a hostile one, just. complicated. I’ve tried to commit to it more times than I’ve tried to commit to going to the gym, and the results have been roughly the same. The catalog system, the import dance, the general feeling that I need to ask permission to edit my own photos. It’s not for me. So when I saw that Adobe’s October 2026 update quietly gave Camera Raw a feature set that starts to look a lot like a standalone photo management app, I paid attention fast.

The Lightroom Tool That Catches You Over-Editing (Before Your Clients Do)
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The Lightroom Tool That Catches You Over-Editing (Before Your Clients Do)

Over-editing is the silent killer of otherwise great photos. I know this personally because I spent years making graphics and memes where “more” was always better — crank the saturation, punch the contrast, slap a vignette on it and call it done. That habit followed me into photo editing and it took an embarrassingly long time to unlearn. The problem is you rarely notice you’ve gone too far until you’re looking at the image a week later wondering why the sky looks like a neon sign.

Lightroom Does the Heavy Lifting, Photoshop Does the Surgery — Here's How to Use Both
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Lightroom Does the Heavy Lifting, Photoshop Does the Surgery — Here's How to Use Both

For years I had a bad habit. Every photo I wanted to edit, I’d open straight in Photoshop. Weddings, portraits, random test shots, it all went through Photoshop one at a time like I was hand-stitching a quilt. It worked, technically, but it was slow, messy, and my file organization was basically a folder called “FINALS” containing 47 files named “final_FINAL_v3_USE_THIS_ONE.psd.” Not exactly a professional operation. The thing that eventually fixed my workflow wasn’t a new plugin or a faster computer.

Lightroom vs Photoshop's Light Layer: Where You Should Actually Be Editing Your Photos
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Lightroom vs Photoshop's Light Layer: Where You Should Actually Be Editing Your Photos

A few months back I watched a friend spend twenty minutes in Photoshop stacking curves layers, luminosity masks, and a lighting adjustment layer to fix the exposure on a landscape shot. It looked great. It also could have taken three minutes in Lightroom. I didn’t say anything because I’ve made the same mistake plenty of times, including recently, when I caught myself reaching for Photoshop out of pure habit when the RAW editor was sitting right there, already open, already better equipped for the job.

Lightroom vs. Photoshop: An Honest Look at When You Actually Need Both
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Lightroom vs. Photoshop: An Honest Look at When You Actually Need Both

There’s a question that floats around photography forums like a bad smell: do you even need Photoshop, or is Lightroom enough? I used to roll my eyes at it. Now I think it’s actually worth sitting with for a minute, because the honest answer is more nuanced than either camp wants to admit. I came across this debate again while watching a tutorial from Matt Kloskowski, where he responds to a viewer comment suggesting that photos edited only in Lightroom are somehow lesser, more basic, not serious work.

Stack Sports Photos Like a Pro: The Lightroom + Photoshop Sequence Composite Technique
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Stack Sports Photos Like a Pro: The Lightroom + Photoshop Sequence Composite Technique

There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from shooting a perfect moment in sports and realizing no single frame tells the full story. You’ve got thirty shots of a soccer player driving toward goal, and individually they’re fine. But none of them capture the kick and the ball and the net at the same time. That’s just physics. A single frame can only freeze one instant. The fix, it turns out, is something I’d seen in sports photography magazines my whole life without ever stopping to think about how it was made: the multi-exposure sequence composite.

Vignettes in Lightroom: Why You're Probably Using the Wrong Tool for the Job
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Vignettes in Lightroom: Why You're Probably Using the Wrong Tool for the Job

I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time applying vignettes in Lightroom the lazy way — drag the Post Crop Vignette slider left, call it a day, move on. And honestly, for a long time it worked fine. Until it didn’t. The problem crept up on me during a client edit where the sky in the upper-left corner was blowing out, the lower-right foreground was already deep in shadow, and slapping a uniform darkening across all four corners made the whole thing look like I’d developed the photo inside a cave.

From Flat RAW to Moody Black and White: A Full Lightroom-to-Photoshop Walkthrough
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From Flat RAW to Moody Black and White: A Full Lightroom-to-Photoshop Walkthrough

I’ll be honest – black and white photography used to feel like something I’d slap on a photo when the colors were too ugly to save. Hit the desaturate button, call it art, move on. It wasn’t until I started paying closer attention to how working photographers actually approach monochrome that I realized how much I’d been leaving on the table. In this KelbyOne tutorial, the whole round-trip is laid out from a completely untouched RAW file all the way through Lightroom adjustments and into Silver Efex Pro for the final black and white conversion.

Stop Choking Your Hard Drive: The Lightroom External Drive Workflow That Keeps Your System Fast
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Stop Choking Your Hard Drive: The Lightroom External Drive Workflow That Keeps Your System Fast

I run Photoshop from a coffee shop table most days, which means my laptop is doing a lot of heavy lifting on not a lot of real estate. For a long time I treated my internal drive like a junk drawer, just dumping everything on it and wondering why things got sluggish around deadline. It wasn’t until I watched this older KelbyOne tutorial, PhotoshopUser TV Episode 293{target="_blank"}, that I realized my file management habits were basically sabotaging my own machine.

Photoshop's Adjust Colors Tool: Slick Interface, Wrong Tool for Photographers
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Photoshop's Adjust Colors Tool: Slick Interface, Wrong Tool for Photographers

If you shoot and edit photos for a living, or even just as a serious hobby, you’ve probably felt the creeping anxiety of Adobe adding new tools to Photoshop and wondering if you’ve been doing everything wrong. New button appears, gets some buzz, and suddenly you’re questioning your entire workflow before you’ve even clicked on the thing. That’s exactly where I found myself when Photoshop’s contextual taskbar started showing a button called “Adjust Colors,” and people in every Facebook group and Reddit thread started treating it like some kind of revelation.

How to Actually Fix a Backlit Candid Portrait (Without Lugging Around Studio Gear)
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How to Actually Fix a Backlit Candid Portrait (Without Lugging Around Studio Gear)

There’s a specific kind of photo that shows up in everyone’s catalog and causes a small amount of existential dread: the backlit candid. You know the one. The light is beautiful, the moment is real, and the subject looks like they’re being interviewed in a witness protection program. I have folders full of these from outdoor events, and for a long time my solution was to either slap a Lightroom preset on them and hope for the best, or just quietly move them to trash.

Lightroom's Curves-in-Masks Combo Is the Local Adjustment I Didn't Know I Was Missing
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Lightroom's Curves-in-Masks Combo Is the Local Adjustment I Didn't Know I Was Missing

I’ll be honest. For the longest time I treated Lightroom like a place where I did the boring stuff before bringing an image into Photoshop to do anything actually interesting. Rough global adjustments, maybe a quick crop, then over to the real tool. That workflow made sense until I started watching what photographers like Nigel Danson were pulling off without ever touching Photoshop. Watch the full tutorial on YouTube In this Nigel Danson tutorial, the focus is on a relatively recent Lightroom update that most people glossed over in the release notes: you can now use the Curves tool inside masks.