The Honest File — Editing & Lightroom Week
Four days from ingestion to A3 print with darkroom manners: a repeatable Lightroom system, the restraint doctrine, and your own five hundred files as the raw material.
The workshop
Editing is where photographs are finished or ruined, and Lars Petersen teaches it with darkroom manners: global before local, tone before colour, restraint before style. The full workflow — ingestion, culling, correction, colour, output — is assembled into a system you can run in an hour a week, practised on five hundred of your own unedited files.
The week ends at the printer, because the print is the only honest proof: soft-proofing, paper choice, and an A3 of your best file, made properly. Lightroom Classic and cloud both run in the room; the principles transfer to every serious editor and the comparison hour says so honestly.
Lars Petersen
Copenhagen · Editing · Lightroom & print
Lars ran a pre-press studio for fifteen years before teaching. He treats editing software as a darkroom with better ventilation, and the print as the only honest proof.
- Your own 500 files as the course material
- The darkroom-order doctrine: global, tone, colour, then style
- A timed hour-a-week system you leave with
- The A3 print, soft-proofed and defended
- Laptop with Lightroom (trial suffices; setup help on day one)
- 500+ of your own unedited raw files on a drive
- Calibration is provided in-room; your enthusiasm for sliders, moderated
- Four days' teaching
- Print materials and your finished A3
- Calibrated working room
- The system documentation
- Flights and accommodation (Arles list provided — book early in festival years)
- Meals
- Lightroom subscription beyond trial
- Travel insurance (required)
Accommodation
Not included; Arles' old town keeps everything within ten minutes' walk of the workshop rooms.
Meals
Not included; the market on Saturday is a legitimate excuse for lateness, once.
Getting around
Arles is walked; arrival by rail via Avignon or Nîmes.
Arles, France
“Tone before colour — four words that fixed five years of files. My A3 from Thursday is the first print I've made that looks like what I saw.”
“The hour-a-week system is real: I've run it every Sunday since. The backlog that haunted me for two years cleared in a month.”
Questions, answered
Classic or cloud Lightroom?
Either — the room runs both and the teaching maps across, with catalogue strategy covered for each. The principles transfer to Capture One and the rest; the comparison hour is honest about trade-offs.
Why Arles?
The town is photography's summer capital and its bookshops and gallery walls are the ideal final classroom — a week of editing should end somewhere prints are taken seriously.
9 seats remaining.
Departures are deliberately small and tend to fill from the newsletter. Booking places no charge — we confirm your seat personally, then arrange payment.
