Browsing all articles by Helen Bradley.

Arrange Files Your Way in Lightroom

Often when you’re working in Lightroom you will want the images to be sorted in the order that you want to see them, not in as order such as capture date which is one of the Lightroom sort options.

You may want to do this when assembling images for a slide show or for printing, [...]

Assemble HDR sequences QTPFSGUI

In the world of HDR imagery, Photomatix is the leading application. However, if you only occasionally need to assemble an HDR sequence, you can save your pennies and use the open source application, qtpfsgui. In this post I’ll show you where to find the application and how to get started using it:

If you are starting [...]

How to Publish Images from Lightroom to Flickr

If you’re a keen photographer, chances are that you publish some of your photos to Flickr for sharing with friends and family. One of the disadvantages of Lightroom 2 is that it does not come with a built in tool for publishing direct to Flickr although this has been addressed in Lightroom 3 which does [...]

Batch Processing in Photoshop Elements

Some time ago I wrote a post on batch resizing images in Photoshop and another on resizing in Lightroom.
One of our readers wrote to me recently explaining that he is using Photoshop Elements and that the resize feature in Photoshop does not work in Photoshop Elements. He is correct, but there is a way of [...]

Photoshop: Applying Fixes using Masks

Sometimes a photo need two opposing fixes applied to different areas of the image. This poses a dilemma – if you fix one area you’ll make the other areas far worse than they started out being and vice versa. The solution is to apply both fixes but to do this on different layers and to [...]

Cropping in Lightroom

In this video tutorial, Helen Bradley explains how to use the Crop tool in Lightroom. Topics include basic cropping and straightening, how to make a fixed size crop including how to make a portrait orientation crop from a landscape orientation image and how to view the available crop overlays.
Code to embed video:

Lightening Backgrounds in Lightroom

I was recently asked by photographer Rhonda Pierce to look at an image that she’d taken and to suggest how the background could be lightened to white in Lightroom.
This image raises an interesting question for anyone involved in post production and trying to understand when to use Lightroom and when to use Photoshop for editing.
Ultimately, [...]

My 5 Coolest Lightroom Commands

There is so much of Lightroom that’s not apparent when you first begin using it and that takes time to discover and explore. Here are my five coolest Lightroom techniques that you might want to add to your Lightroom toolkit.

1. Shortcuts
There are a lot and lots of keystroke shortcuts in Lightroom, and it takes time [...]

How to Create Quick and Easy Web Slideshows with Lightroom

One of the really handy features of Lightroom is its ability to create web slideshows quickly and easily. There are various options you can use and I’ll show you how to use the SimpleViewer slideshow which is good looking and very functional.
Step 1
To get started, prepare all your images and save them as a [...]

Spot Fixing Images in Photoshop

Many of the images that you take particularly cityscapes, like most portraits, can do with some spot fixing. I’ve been traveling through Europe a lot lately and because it’s considered almost de rigeur to smoke there, many of the photos that I have are littered with cigarette butts and assorted garbage.
And although you may [...]