Adobe Finally Fixes Lightroom Healing Brush?!? It’s FAST now.

For years the healing brush tool in Lightroom (Classic) has been pathetically slow and essentially useless unless you only used it to fix one or two tiny spots on an image. If you added any more than that, Lightroom would slow to a crawl. For the most part it forced me to export the image to Photoshop to use their healing and cloning tools when I needed to fix dust spots or remove small imperfections because it was so much faster. Today I was editing a photo in Lightroom Classic (build 1200465) and I noticed that the healing brush seemed …

Read more

What’s The Best Way to Recover Deleted Photos?

If you accidentally delete some photos of your memory card or hard drive, all is not lost, even if you used the “Format card” command. A lot of people don’t realize that when files are deleted, all that is destroyed is the “map” that tells your computer (or camera) where to find the data for the photos. File recovery software can perform scans of your drives or memory cards and rebuild that “map”, essentially bringing the files back from the dead. Yes, even if they have been removed from your trash! One thing to note about this process is that …

Read more

Adobe Changed the Default Lightroom Raw Sharpening in V7.3

I noticed that in the latest update to Lightroom, Adobe is now applying a default sharpening amount of 40 to Raw images, instead of the previous 25.  It has been 25 since Lightroom first came to market I think. I think in most cases this won’t cause people any issues because in theory you should be treating sharpening on a case-by-case basis anyway and adjusting the sharpening and sharpen masking for each image.  It’s just something to be aware of… My guess is that they have done this because the default 25 setting was less perceptible as photo pixel dimensions …

Read more

How to Remove Stuck Time Machine Backups from Mac Trash

This is a little off topic from my usual posts, but I want to make sure the information is out there because this problem was a MAJOR pain in the ass to solve. In fact, even an senior Apple tech support engineer couldn’t wrap his head around it after an hour of trying things. In the end, the solution turned out to be pretty simple. THIS WORKS! Just read the stacks of comments below the post! The Cause Whilst Time Machine will automatically prune old backups to keep the total backup size within the limit of the drive you’re using, …

Read more

Let’s Talk About Luminar 2018… Because Its AWESOME!

Regular blog readers might remember me talking about Macphun’s excellent Aurora HDR and Luminar software over the past year or so, and I’ll tell you right now that you’re going to be hearing a lot more about Luminar from this point onwards. Luminar 2018 will be launched on November 16th (pre-order), but I’ve had a copy for a few weeks now and it has me very excited. To start with, PC users can rejoice because Luminar 2018 will be available on both the Mac and the PC, and with it Macphun will be changing their name to Skylum Software – …

Read more

Introducing: Photo Mechanic Unlocked

I’m really excited to unveil a totally new video training series today called Photo Mechanic Unlocked. I’ve been using Photo Mechanic for many years now, and there’s a very good reason whey you’ll see this software running on nearly every computer screen when you walk into the media centre of any major event: SPEED. This amazing piece of software can totally transform your workflow! The one downside of Photo Mechanic, if you can really call it a downside, is that it has so many features, some of them get a bit lost. A lot of photographers don’t unearth all of these …

Read more

Automated Cloud Backup – I’m Testing CrashPlan For Photographers

I’m forever tweaking my backup routine to suit my evolving business, and refine my workflow. For a long time I have ignored cloud backup services like BackBlaze and CrashPlan because I wasn’t sure if my glacial Canadian upload speeds would work well for something like that. CrashPlan For Photographers Recently I was having a re-think about this though, and since I’ve received so many questions about these kinds of services in the past, I decided to give it a try. Given that a year’s subscription to CrashPlan for unlimited uploads is only $59.99, it’s not the end of the world …

Read more

How to combine PDFs on a mac

Today I wanted to share a quick video with you guys that I think many people will find useful. I know this doesn’t have much to do with photography, but if you run a photo business then at some point you’re going to need to combine PDF pages. It might be a contract, it might be a digital contact sheet or you might be appending receipts to an invoice. No, it’s not sexy, but it IS darned useful and it’s so simple if you’re a Mac user. Sorry PC folks, I don’t use one so I can’t help you guys I’m afraid.

fotoQuote and fotoBiz Review

I’m excited to share with you this review that I just did about fotoQuote and fotoBiz.  These are some incredibly useful programs to help you run your photography business and fotoQuote helps you to answer the age old question, “how much should I charge?”.  I’ve been using fotoQuote for much of my career and I’ve just been introduced to the fotoBiz tool as well.   Check out my fotoQuote review here on ProPhoto Coalition.

Ingesting Multiple Memory Cards Into Adobe Lightroom

Yes, you read that correctly; despite what many people told me, this is entirely possible and incredibly easy!  A little-known function of Lightroom that can save you a lot of time. Check out the video below and be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel for more software tips and tutorials as well as product reviews and tours.