Memos From The Digital Darkroom

When you import existing images from your hard drive into Lightroom, the folder with the files in it is listed in the Folders panel in Lightroom. However, if that folder is inside of another folder, the parent folder is most likely not listed.
Here’s what I mean. My system is to have one main folder or [...]

(This is a article I wrote for the Portland Metro Photographic News website. )
The first time I saw Adobe’s Lightroom, while it was in its earliest beta version, I wondered what the point of it was. I could already do everything it did in Photoshop. Why did I need to learn a new way of [...]

A couple of weeks ago I was teaching a Lightroom workshop to a group of photographers in Eugene, Oregon. When we were going through a hands-on exercise on importing files, three of the students had a problem following my instructions. It seems that some of their file naming presets had gone missing. Fortunately, the same [...]

In earlier days of digital photography, the primary approach to organization was to organize files into specific folders based on image content. This system can lead to some problems. A much better system is to use keyword tags to identify and filter for specific image content.

A change to the preferences in Bridge CS4 affects the way labels added in Lightroom are shown.

You can quickly navigate through files in Lightroom or folders in Bridge using the back and forward buttons on your mouse.

When I sit down with a new client, I ask them a series of questions that are designed to help me understand their level of workflow skills and knowledge. I’m often amazed at how often people who seem to be Photoshop savvy seem to get sharpening wrong. I ran into this twice last week so [...]

In all of the years I’ve been into photography, I’ve never tried shooting fireworks. It’s something I’ve been interested in, but  never got around to doing. This year I decided to change that by making a point to go downtown and shoot the fireworks show that launched the 2009 Portland Rose Festival.
When I arrived at [...]

One of the first things to understand about Lightroom is that it’s a cataloging software. That means that everything you do in Lightroom is recorded in a type of database.That’s why any edits you make in the Develop module are non-destructive - they can be undone at any time in the future.
The analogy I usually [...]

Lightroom is loaded with useful keyboard shortcuts. But sometimes keys get pressed by accident and strange things unexpectedly happen. Following is a list of the three keyboard shortcut problems I get called about the most.
T - The T key is used to hide/show the Toolbar that’s displayed below the main viewing area. Hiding the Toolbar [...]