Our Favorites from the 5DayDeal “Photography Bundle 2022” ($98)

We’ve had some time to go through the 10th anniversary 5DayDeal “Photography Bundle 2022” — as usual, it is an inspiring collection of training material and resources. It’s available for only $98 for five days only — expiring on October 18th at 3 PM ET, and this bundle will never be offered again! 10% of your purchase goes to great charities.

There are several levels to the “Photography Bundle 2022” — in addition to the main bundle you can add the “Pro Bundle” or the “Complete Charity Bundle” for even more learning opportunities. For our review this year, we decided to pick (and write about) our one favorite course from each of the “Main”, “Pro”, and “Complete Charity” bundles.

The Main Bundle includes 23 courses: it’s hard to pick one. Scott Kelby’s portrait retouching and Benjamin Jaworskyj’s landscape photography course are close runner-ups, but our favorite was Tim Grey’s “Cleaning Up Your Mess in Lightroom Classic”. While most Lightroom courses have focused on the editing side, Tim Grey’s is refreshingly unique: he teaches you how to organize your photos and streamline your workflows. If your Lightroom catalog is anything like ours — hundreds of thousands of photos taken over a decade — Tim will help you clean it up, with five hours of practical tips (split into bite-sized 3-4 minute lessons).

It was also hard to choose from the 15 courses in the Pro Bundle. The 5-Day Real Estate Photographer crash course was a close second, but we learned the most from PHLEARN’s “Frequency Separation Retouching”. Frequency separation retouching involves splitting an image into high-frequency layers (detail and texture) and low-frequency layers (colors and tones), enabling you to edit while preserving fine details, critical for preserving skin texture when retouching portraits. The course walks you through all the steps of editing in this new paradigm — large and small detail correction, dodging and burning, and color correction.

The Complete Charity Bundle adds 11 more courses and 2 plugins, and it’s one of those plugins that was our favourite product in the bundle! The “Web Sharp Pro Panel” from Greg Benz is a Photoshop plugin that makes it easier to export images for sharing to your website and social media. Export templates let you set the desired cropping for export in the right resolution and aspect for different social media formats, while taking care of resizing, sharpening, colorspace, JPG compression, watermarking, and other details. It’s fully customizable so you can make your own quick export settings and templates. Overall a powerful tool and definite time-saver for those who primarily export images for the web or social media.

As usual, the “The Photography Bundle 2022” is great value at $98. We think it’s worth a purchase if one or two of the items catch your interest, and perhaps something unexpected in the bundle will inspire you. As before, 10% goes to charities so you are also supporting very worthwhile causes. Check out the bundle before it’s gone!