As a photographer, my focus has been on becoming the best I can be with the complexities and power of Lightroom. I’m very pleased to announce that Adobe has awarded me Certified Instructor status in Lightroom. Different and more coveted than my Adobe Certified Expert status (ACE), an Adobe Certified Instructor (ACI) is an ACE with proven training expertise. I had to prove my instructor qualifications with referrals from my 9 years at F.I.T. and show that I’ve been an involved member of the Lightroom community and passed one or more ACE exams. Now that I have been vetted by Adobe as a Certified Instructor, I am privileged to be one of only 35 Adobe Certified Lightroom Instructors in the world.
As part of my certification, I have also become an Adobe Lightroom Training Partner, one of only two in NYC.
If you work on a desktop computer, then I recommend the 
I’m excited to announce the launch of 
Unlike other workshops, many of our 
Select the Eyedropper by clicking on the icon in the White Balance section. Without clicking again, hover the tip of the Eyedropper on or near something by your main subject that is a best guess for a color that is supposed be “neutral.” (You’ll get an error message if you choose something close to 0% black or 100% white.) The target grid is actually the image under the eyedropper tip highly magnified. Look over your photo for a white shirt or handkerchief, gray pants, a gray wall, or a dull silver object (but not the highlight) in your photo. In a pinch, I’ve even used the target grid to find a neutral pixel on teeth or the white of an eye to white balance a photo! When you have the tip of the eyedropper over a neutral color, click once.
How do you read the eyedropper? Easy. Hover the tip of the eyedropper over the color you want to neutralize. In the example to the left the eyedropper tip is over the shirt collar but I haven’t clicked yet because I want to read the numbers at the bottom of the target magnifier. The Red, Green and Blue values of R93.7% G89.4% B 71.4% make this white shirt yellow. These percentages would be nearly equal values if the shirt was neutral. Once I click on the collar, Lightroom will try to make those RGB values equal. That’s because equal amounts of Red, Green and Blue make a neutral tone without a color cast. For previews of white balance color changes, keep an eye on your Navigator window while hovering the eyedropper over different areas of your photo. 
After I click, the magnifier disappears and the color I clicked on should appear neutral with no color cast. This will be an overall color change to the photo and, depending upon the kind of light source(s) in your scene, it should render pleasing skin tones. If I want to check the color, I select the eyedropper again, never clicking, only hovering over the same place to see if my RGB values are equal. They are close. Remember, do not click this time. From these numbers I’m very close to a perfect neutral tone. Close is close enough. I tap the keyboard escape key (esc) to place the eyedropper back in it’s dock, turning it off. Or, you can just click in the eyedropper dock to put it back.
That’s pretty much the basics of using the eyedropper in the White Balance section of the Basic panel. It won’t always work the first time, so click away until you find something that works for you. You’re letting the power of the Lightroom White Balance Selector do the color cast correction guesswork first. Now you can go and tweak your white balanced photo with the Temp and Tint sliders because you’ve got a good head start. Dragging your Temp slider left makes your photo more blue, while dragging the slider to the right makes it more yellow/red. The Tint slider fine tunes the colors – Green to Magenta – that are not part of the color temperature range. If you find the color cast getting worse, you can undo it by choosing the “White Balance: Custom” step in the History Panel on the Left of the Develop module. This is the name of the step where you used the eyedropper. After you’ve finished removing your color cast, I recommend continuing on to the next section of the Basic panel under White Balance, the Tone section. This where you should continue developing, with adjustments to exposure, highlights, shadows, etc. to further improve the details of your photo.
With the idea of a 2017 India photo tour workshop, I trekked through Kerala, India with a series of talented, local guides by car, bike and foot. It’s an amazing place with infinite opportunities to shoot everything from the local color, to massive terraced tea plantations and Chinese fishing nets, and wild elephants and tigers (which are pretty rare – I didn’t see one).
Get as much RAM as possible. I rarely ever see anyone who just uses Lightroom alone with no other programs open. Usually I see a browser, sometimes two browsers (browsers can be real memory hogs), along with mail, iTunes, Calendar, Photoshop, Spotify, a Twitter app and frequently a dozen other apps. RAM gets allocated to all these open programs and the computer slows down considerably as it starts to use the hard drive to do calculations. That is, unless you have a Solid State Drive (see SSD – next). So, get as much RAM as you can. This is especially true if you’ve purchased the 
