This article is part one of a two part series on how to improve the performance of Lightroom. Lightroom is a very resource intensive application and you’ll find that as you get quicker and more efficient in Lightroom, the actual software itself will be what’s slowing you down. This tutorial is going to give you 10 tips on how to improve the performance of Lightroom on your machine without purchasing or upgrading your existing hardware.

In this article, we are going to talk about Lightroom preferences and system settings. While in the second part of this two part series we will create a hardware guide where we will teach you which components to upgrade first for the biggest performance boost.

So, let’s get on to discussing 10 Tips on Improving Lightroom’s Performance. If you would like to see this tutorial in its …

A Guest Post by Sondra Pyrch from ShinyBlackApple Photography.

Not every beginner photographer is familiar with white balance concept and use.

And it was the same case for me when I started to get into photography.

White Balance assist you to get the colours in your images as precise as possible.

There are a few ways how you can adjust your white balance and make your pictures look more natural.

In this tutorial I will focus on the easiest way that you can be 100% sure you will get your white balance right.

And it is using grey card. All you need to have is a grey card either purchased from a photography gear shop or you might have some neutral grey paper yourself (make sure it’s non reflective though).

I got my grey card from calumets (cost me around

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HDR Photography has been around since the days of film, but has become extremely popular in recent years. High Dynamic Range, or HDR, is essentially a way of processing photos that allows for a wider and deeper range of colors. This type of processing makes an image appear much closer to what the human eye sees as opposed to what your camera’s sensor allows. In example, the photograph above shows the natural rich colors of the building as well as the natural rich colors of the sky. Without HDR, the sky could either be well exposed and the building silhouetted, or the building well exposed and the sky blown out. Creating an HDR photo however will allows both elements to appear natural and rich in color.

One method of making an HDR photograph is to …

With all the tools available today to retouch digital portraits, it’s easy for us to go way overboard with editing on photos. We make a few adjustments here and there, then make a few more, and before we know it, the photo looks completely different – sometimes good, and sometimes, well, not so good.

I’ve been shooting portraits now for about 6 years with a digital camera, and when I think of some of the editing I did early on, all I can do is cringe. Yes, there is a place to do extra editing, but, we should use editing to enhance the portrait and the subject, not to detract from our subject.

When I go to edit a photo, I want to enhance the beauty that’s already there. Hopefully, I’ve gotten all the lighting correct …

A Guest Post by Scott Williams.

Post processing is an important part of a photographer’s work and can be time consuming and overwhelming. The more time you spend behind a computer post processing, the less time you have to spend behind the camera. Luckily there are things you can do to streamline your post processing.

Adobe Lightroom 3 has a number of tools that you can take advantage of to dramatically cut down on your post processing time. In this article I will cover five tips that will save you time in Lightroom 3.

Tip # 1 – Copy and Paste Settings

Lightroom 3 allows you to copy the actions you performed on one photo and apply it to other photos. This …