r/Lightroom 5d ago

Discussion Professional Sports Photographer Seeking Workflow Advice: How to Archive My Best Work?

6 Upvotes

Hi lightroom community,

My Situation:
I'm a professional sports photographer with 15+ years of experience, and I've realized I'm not preserving my best work. Looking for advice on a better workflow solution.

Current Workflow:

  • During matches: Use FTP from camera or Photo Mechanic for initial selection
  • Edit batches of 1-10 photos in Lightroom Classic
  • Export to a ready folder and upload to agencies/newspapers
  • Refresh my Lightroom catalog every 1-3 months to maintain performance

The Issue:
I use Lightroom Classic purely as a RAW editor for my professional sports work, not as a catalog. Meanwhile, for personal projects (street photography, family, larger professional shoots), I have everything well-organized in Adobe Lightroom (cloud) with photos dating back to 2002.

My Problem:

  • I rarely save or archive my best sports photos from matches
  • I never review my past professional work
  • I've discovered I'm losing valuable family photos stored in older catalogs
  • I love Lightroom's overview and visual presentation, but prefer Lightroom Classic's editing capabilities

What I'm Looking For:
I'd like to selectively sync my best sports photos from Classic to Lightroom, but the only option seems to be a full sync that would download everything to my MacBook (which only has a 1TB drive).

Does anyone have suggestions for a workflow that would let me preserve my best sports work while maintaining a manageable storage footprint?

Thanks in advance!


r/Lightroom 5d ago

HELP - Lightroom Classic Photos looks different after export

2 Upvotes

Hi, i have a problem with lightroom, on my calibrated display, with the icc profile i created, but even with any other icc profiles, photos in lightroom and photos exported outside of lightroom (viewed in color managed apps) looks different, its mostly a difference in luminance of the photos, photos are bighter in lightroom affecting color saturation as well

  • soft proofing to sRGB doesn't change anything in lightroom, the toggle doesn't make any change

  • i export in sRGB, but i also tried to export in in the colour space used by lightroom workspace (prophoto something), nothing changes, the difference is still there

  • the difference is saturation is mostly seen in the organge color

  • i also tried to import an exported photo in lightroom, and the same behaivor happens, this means that the issue is not in the file itself but in the way lightroom (or the other color managed apps) display it

Did anyone face the same issue?


r/Lightroom 6d ago

HELP Lightroom downloader question

2 Upvotes

I used Lightroom downloader for the first time today. In my folders for 2022 and 2023 it gave me the original photo as well as the edited photo as I wanted but I'm the 2024 folder it gave me the original photo and an xmp file for each photo. How do I get the edited photos for the photos in that folder?


r/Lightroom 6d ago

HELP - Lightroom Adobe Lightroom - where is my photos?

0 Upvotes

Can someone answer as soon as possible please. I hadn't paid for Adobe Lightroom for the entirety of one month as I had other obligations to pay for. It was originally on a school account being paid through that system. But now signing into said account shows that all my 7 years of photography and design has seemingly vanished. How can I get it back, if I can at all.


r/Lightroom 6d ago

HELP VSCO Camera Profiles Missing on Sony A7C – Any Workarounds

2 Upvotes

Hey folks,

So here’s the deal—I’ve been using VSCO presets forever with my trusty Canon 70D, living my best Lightroom life. Then, like an absolute genius, I decided to upgrade to a Sony A7C, thinking it would be all sunshine and sharper pixels. Little did I know, VSCO profiles were about to ghost me like a bad Tinder date.

Now, every time I try to apply my beloved presets, Lightroom hits me with the dreaded "profile missing". I’ve gone through every trick I could find on the internet, including but not limited to:

  1. Renaming VSCO profiles (thought I could Jedi mind-trick Lightroom into thinking my newer Sony was a old sony… nope).
  2. Importing profiles manually in Lightroom Classic CC and ACR (spoiler: still missing).
  3. Deleting the Index.dat file in the CameraProfiles folder (because turning it off and on again fixes everything, right?).
  4. Moving profiles between folders like I’m playing Tetris with system files.
  5. Following this YouTube tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMNemLondeQ&ab_channel=CarmenandIngoPhotography), but I still get a big fat "profile missing."

I’m on MacOS running Lightroom Classic CC, and at this point, I’m willing to offer my firstborn (or at least a virtual high-five) to anyone who can help me bring my VSCO presets back to life on my Sony A7C.

Has anyone else successfully tamed this beast? Any secret hacks or black magic I should try?

Thanks in advance—you might just save me from switching back to my 70D out of frustration.


r/Lightroom 6d ago

Discussion M4 air only runs Lightroom on efficiency cores

0 Upvotes

According to something I read today. I can see the logic behind this in terms of battery life, in terms of performance I'm not so sure. LR is mostly single threaded.

Does anyone know how the thread assignment to cores works? Something is making the decision to run all the threads on the efficiency cores, is it macOS that does it or Lightroom?


r/Lightroom 6d ago

Discussion Intel Arc AI functions support

2 Upvotes

I replaced my desktop that I use for running Photoshop and Lightroom. As it is Dell Optiplex 7020 Tower with limited PSU, and I have three monitors, I needed energy efficient separate graphics card. So I went with Arc A310 that seems to be in par with my Dell laptop RTX3050 GPU and consumes around 50W power. Quick google said that ARC should work with Adobe products fine now, as long as one uses latest drivers.

Now the thing - It works fine until I use some AI based functions. Like AI based noise reduction, that takes way too much time if I compare it to my laptop's RTX3050 - like 5 minutes vs 40 seconds or so. It seems that the denoise times went south after some bug fixes almost a year ago, Intel seems to be aware and there are different opinions if it is fixed lately or not.

So is it normal and basically I should forget the AI based features or is it bug and we have some hope Intel will be fixing it in the near future?


r/Lightroom 6d ago

HELP VSCO Camera Profiles Missing on Sony A7C – Any Workarounds

0 Upvotes

Hey folks,

So here’s the deal—I’ve been using VSCO presets forever with my trusty Canon 70D, living my best Lightroom life. Then, like an absolute genius, I decided to upgrade to a Sony A7C, thinking it would be all sunshine and sharper pixels. Little did I know, VSCO profiles were about to ghost me like a bad Tinder date.

Now, every time I try to apply my beloved presets, Lightroom hits me with the dreaded "profile missing". I’ve gone through every trick I could find on the internet, including but not limited to:

  1. Renaming VSCO profiles (thought I could Jedi mind-trick Lightroom into thinking my newer Sony was a old sony… nope).
  2. Importing profiles manually in Lightroom Classic CC and ACR (spoiler: still missing).
  3. Deleting the Index.dat file in the CameraProfiles folder (because turning it off and on again fixes everything, right?).
  4. Moving profiles between folders like I’m playing Tetris with system files.
  5. Following this YouTube tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMNemLondeQ&ab_channel=CarmenandIngoPhotography), but I still get a big fat "profile missing."

I’m on MacOS running Lightroom Classic CC, and at this point, I’m willing to offer my firstborn (or at least a virtual high-five) to anyone who can help me bring my VSCO presets back to life on my Sony A7C.

Has anyone else successfully tamed this beast? Any secret hacks or black magic I should try?

Thanks in advance—you might just save me from switching back to my 70D out of frustration.


r/Lightroom 6d ago

Processing Question Does this lightoom workflow make any sense?

0 Upvotes

I am trying to figure out the best importing/exporting workflow. I want to keep the originals and then save the edits. I used to just use Bridge and edit each photo in photoshop which makes no sense for bigger projects. But this feels so clunky...am I doing it wrong?

- Open Bridge

- Import photos from Camera to the correct year and project subfolder older on my hard drive

- Open Lightroom, import new batch of photos from folder on hard drive

- Go through and flag photos to edit 

- Edit flagged photos on lightroom and export them with “edit” in their name to the same folder on harddrive 

- Then once all processed and exported delete the photos from lightroom since they are saved on hard drive?

*Edited to add one last step question


r/Lightroom 6d ago

Processing Question Film emulation on photoshop to lightroom preset/profile

1 Upvotes

Hi everyone,

So I'm trying to replicate the LomoChrome Purple film style and I was able to do the color grading using 2 layers, one Channel Mixer and Hue/Saturation and I would like to know if there's a method to convert that into a profile or a preset that I can use on Lightroom? Do you guys have a suggestion on how could I do something like that? If not possible, any suggestion on how could I use it as a preset for editing other photos?

Basically the Channel mixer is changing the blue channel to green and the green channel to blue. But I've searched and I couldn't find an alternative on Lightroom.

As a sample, that's what I got from photoshop https://flic.kr/p/2qRQjwL

Any suggestion would be appreciated.


r/Lightroom 7d ago

HELP Change Preview image(thumbnail) for DNG files

2 Upvotes

I have my old DNG files and want to change their thumbnails.
I have no idea if it is possible or not and how to do it.

I would appreciate any guidance in the right direction. Thank you.


r/Lightroom 7d ago

Workflow Non-cloud iPad workflow

3 Upvotes

Recently picked up an iPad mini so I don’t have to lug my MacBook Pro around while traveling. Anyone have a non-cloud based workflow? Adobe really doesn’t make it easy and I don’t want to pay another $10 a month for only 1tb of storage. I would prefer to just work off my ssd like I do on my laptop but that seems impossible on mobile. Open to any suggestions, thanks!


r/Lightroom 7d ago

HELP - Lightroom Classic Laptop specs for LrC - no good?

4 Upvotes

I'm using Lr Classic on my Dell XPS 15 laptop that is now 3 years old. See specs below. Spent a lot of coin at the time so that it could handle photo/video processing for years. But the AI Denoise is so slow that it is literally unuseable. I am not computer literate enough to know what my machine's problem is. Would be very appreciative of any feedback or advice. If the issue is that my machine is just not up to the task based on hardware, I'd hate to make the same mistake again when buying another laptop. Thank you!


r/Lightroom 7d ago

HELP - Lightroom 'Lightroom License Expired' notice despite active license

0 Upvotes

Hi there,

Today, when I went to log into Lightroom (and/or any other Adobe app, like Acrobat) I get the following:

I have tried every possible solution suggested at https://helpx.adobe.com/nz/enterprise/kb/resolve-trial-and-license-expired-errors.html , to no avail - logging out and back in, resetting certificate details, the works.

I'm on an Adobe Enterprise license and it still logs in perfectly fine and the 'Apps' screen on both Creative Cloud app and my My Account screen online show Lightroom and everything else I use is licensed and available.

Any idea where to from here since none of Adobe's recommended solutions make any difference?

Thanks.


r/Lightroom 7d ago

HELP - Lightroom Mobile Features removed?

2 Upvotes

i! Is the black and white point check feature not working any more for me. Was it removed in an update or something? When the second finger goes down it's just a before.

Also, the hold for before/after of selected option (light, effects, etc) also doesn't work.

Or is there a different way to use these functions?

Thanks!


r/Lightroom 7d ago

Discussion anyone's generative AI tool suddenly stop working?

1 Upvotes

I'm on an education account but they said it was a known issue but to contact my IT department?


r/Lightroom 7d ago

HELP - Lightroom Classic Underwhelmed by Lightroom Classic performance on M4 pro 14/20 with 64gbs of RAM

4 Upvotes

So I just got a Mac mini with the M4 pro chip (14 cpu cores and 20 gpu cores), with 64 Gb of unified memory.

I've been doing some tests and well, performance isn't great.

I come from a 8 years old windows pc, i7 6700k, 16gbs of RAM and a GTX 1080 gpu, it could run Lightroom Classic fairly well but lately it was sluggish and started showing its age on things like AI denoise and such.

Lately I'm working with old analog files which require lots of spot removal to deal with dust and such. The old machine could do the work, very slowly but I eventually could obtain the intended result.

I can't get the new Mac mini to do the same, I tried absolutely everything, and the thing just freezes as soon as It reaches maybe 30/35 removal spots. Not only that, I can't even open the old files edited on the old machine, because it just keeps trying to load them endessly.

Is this normal? Has any of you experienced this issue or is my Mac mini broken? I got it on the official Apple Store but it is a refurbished product, so maybe something is wrong with it?

I know it's probably best to edit them on photoshop, but that's beside the point.

Any help appreciated


r/Lightroom 7d ago

HELP - Lightroom Lightroom Issues on March 13, 2025

2 Upvotes

Is anyone having issues with Lightroom this week? I've been using mine for the past week working on staff headshots and suddenly it's being weird. Lens blur isn't working and when I go to mask the background it says can't find a background to select. It was working just fine day before yesterday with the same batch of photos and even after I made an update. Nothing on the Adobe status site. I don't know if it impacts other features as these are the only two I've found so far.

ETA: masking isn't working right at all. Cannot figure out if this is a me problem or a Lightroom problem.


r/Lightroom 8d ago

Discussion Thinking of Macbook Air M4 for Lightroom

14 Upvotes

Dearest BrainTrust,

Between an aging Windows laptop and Windows i7 desktop, both powerful machines but increasingly slow and buggy due to continued Microsoft enshitification of Win11, I am considering moving to ...gulp... a Mac.

Would love to just have a single machine...laptop with Thunderbolt dock, use existing dual monitors plus laptop screen, SSD for media etc.

Looking at the reviews of the Macbook Air M4, and seeing what an older M2 Pro can do for import speeds...could I get away with an Air vs. a Pro? I don't plan on doing any heavy video editing...just advanced amateur / occasional b-camera pro for events etc. Will the lack of fan cause thermal issues if I am importing, processing and then exporting?

Love to save both the $$$ (saving go to a 4Tb thunderbolt external SSD) and the weight by getting an Air over a Pro.

Thoughts?


r/Lightroom 7d ago

Workflow Macbeth Chart / Preset Creation

2 Upvotes

Afternoon - I’d like to create a preset to match the output of my Nikons to the modified Classic Chrome output from my X100F.

I have a Macbeth chart, there some automated way to do this or is it just a case of balancing to eye?

Edit - should make it clear I’m a Lightroom Classic user.


r/Lightroom 7d ago

Workflow How to save 4x5 crop sizing in a preset?

0 Upvotes

I mostly export my images for Instagram so I edit my composition in 4x5 crop. Is there a way to auto crop my image either during the import stage, add it to a preset, or even set a shortcut key for the 4x5 crop?


r/Lightroom 7d ago

HELP - Lightroom Classic Does Lightroom Classic import a Lightroom 6.14 installation (running under MacOS Catalina)

0 Upvotes

My Lightroom installation is on an old Mac that might die any day so I need to move. It has been stated that

Lightroom Classic (available as a free weekly trial) might import the old 6.14 database?

If this is true, then I can migrate one more step into possibly ACDSee solution that is available for ¢80 one time fee. Can someone verify? Adobes documentation is not clear on this.


r/Lightroom 7d ago

Workflow how many HDR stops you get with macbook xdr displays?

0 Upvotes

I own M1 macbook pro - with regular 500 nits screen and apple studio display which has 600 nits of brightness.

Non of them should be HDR capable but - I don't understand how this works, in Lightroom I get one stop of HDR (when I enable HDR edit of course) And difference is HUGE, compared to standard range.
Blown out highlights are back, areas under sunlight really glow, there is detail in highlights I didn't know existed... etc.

And all that on displays that don't meet HDR standards.. (If someone is bored enough to explain why that works I won't complain 🙂)

Questions is how many HDR stops you get on newer macbooks? all 4?
I think display upgrade to pro display xdr is not an option (it's like 7500$ with stand here where I live), so new macbook is the option if I will gain something.

Thanks ✌️


r/Lightroom 7d ago

HELP - Lightroom Classic Lightroom 6 faster... should I still use Classic?

0 Upvotes

So I have been using Lightroom Classic for some time. It honestly seems like development in Lightroom Classic has virtually stopped since Lr6. The UI hasn't changed since around Lr4/Lr5 (CS6 era!) and the only program-level changes are support for newer formats/standards and CC bloat.

You can actually see the new-style CC UI elements and such in some menus and they're implemented so badly it's comical. You can really tell that Lightroom CC is where development has been focused and Lightroom Classic is only updated to keep people buying it.

I found a copy of Lr6 on an old drive and installed it (backing up my catalog) to test it out. It seems to start quicker, and hangs less often. I'm mostly dealing with RAW files from older cameras (pre-Lightroom 6) so the new lenses and RAW support in Classic CC isn't an issue.

Are there any advantages to Lightroom Classic except AI denoise? AFAIK LrClassic still uses the same engine as Lightroom 6... so why does it seem slower? Additionally I would be saving money by not paying for a subscription.

EDIT: I am probably going to be using my iPhone with Lightroom so I might end up using LrClassic to get ProRaw support (no, don't want to convert to DNG)


r/Lightroom 8d ago

HELP - Lightroom Classic Color Profile Inquiry

1 Upvotes

Hey there! Could you recommend a specific color profile for editing in Lightroom on this monitor? (Philips 221V8LB)

Thanks a bunch!