Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips

Happy Friday everyone. I hope you’re all having a great holiday season. My kids are just about coming out of their skin waiting for Santa to come and it’s just a great time of year to be a dad. Anyway, on to some Lightroom stuff. Check this out! If your mouse has a scroll wheel you’ll like this tip. You know those target adjustment tools (TAT for short) that we get with the Tone Curve as well as the HSL/Grayscale panel? If not, just look at the graphic on the left of this tip and it’s circled. Well, when you hover over a point on your image you usually think of clicking and dragging to use the TAT. Instead, try using your scroll wheel on your mouse. It’s just a little easier. Plus, I use the scroll wheel all the time when I’m in the Develop module and I want to scroll down past one panel to get to another one. Finally, if your scroll wheel has a left-to-right scrolling ability then try that when you’re down over the filmstrip at the bottom. The only trick is you’ve got to make sure you put your mouse cursor over that general area. Have a great Christmas weekend everyone. Mine will be chocked full of last minute trips to the mall (God help me!) and the grocery store. But it’s all good right?

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Hey folks. I’ve got some cool news for you in the world of online training. First off, the company I work for, Kelby Training has launched a brand new website dedicated to online training. And when I say launched, I mean we jumped in head first and created the flat-out best online training resource on the planet. The only other place you’ll find so many world-class instructors at once is, well… probably at Photoshop World. Kelby Training has pretty much taken the dream team behind Photoshop World and put them online. Names like Bert Monroy, Dan Margulis, Katrin Eismann, Eddie Tapp, and Scott Kelby to name a few. What makes this online training really special (besides the world-class instructors) is the content. You’ll be hard pressed to find as many Photoshop CS3 classes anywhere. Plus, there’s classes on photography (from masters such as Joe McNally, Moose Peterson, and David Ziser) that are like nothing else out there.
Now, of course I’m really excited about the whole thing. But what’s really cool for me on a personal note is that, with the new site, are debuts several of my new courses.
1) Photoshop CS3 for Wedding Photographers
2) Automating Photoshop for Photographers
3) Adobe Certified Expert Exam Prep (coming very soon)
My Lightroom Basic Training course is also up there so if you’ve never seen it before it’s all part of the subscription price. Oh… the price. It’s really simple. $19.99/month or $199/year. No strings attached. You get access to everything. Not one course… all of them. So head on over to Kelby Training and give it a try (yep, you can see the first 3 lessons in each course for free). Thanks!

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I had a pleasant surprise yesterday when I looked through my Google alerts. I noticed that Lightroom Killer Tips had been mentioned on Photography Bay’s 28 Great Lightroom resources. They’ve compiled a list of all the best resources on the web and I made it (near the top even!). What’s really cool is that they mention some resources from Adobe, Peachpit Press, and Layers Magazine - all of which I write for so it’s like a quadruple dose of Matt (and who doesn’t want more right ). So make sure you pay the list a visit because there’s plenty of Lightroom stuff out there that you may be missing.
That said, there’s one resource on there that wasn’t mentioned and it’s one of the sites I visit all the time. Sean McCormack’s Lightroom Blog is a great (and frequently updated) website that you’ll want to put on your Lightroom list. So if you’ve got some vacation time coming up over the holidays and want to catch up on everything there is to know about Lightroom, now you’ve got 29 places to go. You’d better get to it!

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I know, the presets usually come on Monday but I wanted to change it up this week. Actually, yesterday just got away from me. Anyway, this week I’ve got some presets for you that are specifically geared for sunsets with lots of sky. As I was looking through my photos I realized there were basically two types of sunsets - cool or warm. The cooler ones typically had lots of blues and some reds in them. The warmer ones had more of a yellowish color to them. So I made a few tweaks in White Balance as well as HSL and saved them a while back. Now whenever I have a sunset photo I usually give these a try first and I get great results most of the time. If anything, it’s a great starting point and you can always go tweak the Temperature and Tint settings under White Balance for more or less of the effect. Have at ‘em!

Click here to see a sample of the preset.
Click here to download Matt’s Cool/Warm Sunset Presets
Click here to see a video on how to install presets.

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Managing Panoramas (henceforth known as panos) and HDR photos in Lightroom is an important step in making your life a lot easier if you like that type of photography. See, I love to shoot panos. I’m not so big on HDR, but I know there are plenty of folks out there that are. What happens after shooting a lot of either type of photography is that your library becomes really cluttered. As if the clutter wasn’t bad enough, it just becomes flat-out difficult to start processing these types of photos. So instead of ditching Lightroom when you shoot at pano or HDR set, check out this week’s video and give it a try.

Click here to watch the video. (13Mb)

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