Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips

This week’s gallery spotlight is on Patrick Hoelck photography. I came across Patrick’s portfolio about a year ago and just found it again today. I love this kind of stuff! His work is dark, it’s edgy, and it has a ton of feeling in it. It almost has the look of some photographers like Joey Lawrence and Dave Hill but it’s also very different. For starters, I don’t think he’s doing the same type of post-processing they are (notice I said “type of post-processing” - there’s still definitely work being done but it’s very different from what I can see). Plus, it’s great to see some one’s style injected into so many different types of work and clients. So make sure you check this one out. It’s an easy site to navigate too (I just love those horizontal scroll navigation schemes for some reason).

I was recently reading a question asked by some folks who were upgrading to Leopard (newest Mac OS) and they wanted to know how to back up Lightroom in case a catastrophe happened in the OS upgrade process. That sparked an idea that I’ve been wanting to cover for a while, and it affects both PC and Mac users. The topic is, “How do you back up Lightroom?” I mean, what do you do to make sure that if your computer decides to go bye-bye tomorrow, that you’re safe and can easily be back up and running with Lightroom (AND ALL of your photos AND ALL of the things that you’ve done to your photos). Personally, I’ve had about 3 laptop hard drive crashes in the last 5 or so years. Maybe I’m just hard on my laptops. Personally, I always thought it was OK to toss it across the room to a friend, but maybe I’m alone on that one Anyway, that little question is what brought on this week’s video. I think you’ll find it’s actually way easier then you thought to keep Lightroom and all of its managed photos backed up and ready to restore whenever you need.

Click here to watch the video. (7 Mb)

A few weeks ago I posted this video on creating a custom contact sheet that actually looks more like a cool print then it does a contact sheet. If you missed the video or are just too plain lazy and never got around to creating the preset, then you’re in luck today. Even if you saw the video and created the preset, you’ll like this one because there’s an extra for you. This week I’ve created two printing presets that were born from one of the Contact Sheet presets in Lightroom’s Print module. One is a 3×3 grid and the other is a 2×2 grid. The 3×3 requires that you have 9 photos and the 2×2 needs 4 (I know, simple math but hey, it’s Monday and I didn’t want to make you think too much) . They’re an awesome way to spice up a simple print. Plus, sometimes you’ve got a bunch of photos that, by themselves, aren’t print worthy but when they’re all together easily pull of a pro-quality print. I’ve got lots more that I’ll be sharing over the coming months but here are a couple to get you going.
- Here’s a sample of what one of the presets looks like.
- Download the presets here.

Today I’ve got a great tip for you that, truth be told, isn’t really mine. Yep, I’m stealing tips these days. It’s a problem I’ve had that really dates back to my childhood years Now it’s back and I find myself stealing a tip from Daryl Naumann. Daryl (just trying to do a nice thing) wrote in on the feedback form on this site and said this:
“… (nice stuff about me)… When using the crop tool to resize, it does dim the part of the photo that is going to be cropped out, but sometimes it’s not really enough to see the true effect of cropping at that edge. Hitting the L key at this point to go into Lights Out mode darkens it right down though, allowing you to still move the crop box around to see exactly what the photo will look like when cropped. I’ve found it to be a great help… (more nice stuff).”
Daryl… I agree 100%. That tip rocks! It makes cropping so much better. Have a great weekend everyone. I’ll be attending my weekly TSA meeting tomorrow (no, not the Transportation Safety Authority - it stands for Tip Stealing Anonymous).

If you find yourself emailing photos a lot, then you should watch this video. You can not only export a slideshow into PDF format so it can easily be emailed, but you can also watermark those photos with a cool trick I’ll show you. That way, you’re covered when you send the photos to some one else. They can see ‘em, but they can’t really do anything with them.

Click here to watch the video. (27 Mb)