I recommend that whatever display you use should have in-plane-switching (IPS).
The advantage of IPS is that what you see is not viewing angle dependent.

How do you know you are exposing to the right? My cameras Nikon D810 and Sony A7Rii have a live histogram, This means I can see it before I take the shot.
The D810 live histogram appears only in live view but the Sony appears in the viewfinder and on the LCD.
Be aware that this histogram is based on a jpg and is not quite accurate. When you review the pictures (chimp) you can set your camera up to see a RGB histogram.
Here you can see if the reds are blowing out and make an adjustment for the next picture.

If you're using BBF make sure you are in AF-C mode all the time. Focus will lock when you take your finger off the button.

Photoshop does have Clarity. Lightroom is basically Camera Raw with a different interface. Camera Raw is available as a filter in Photoshop (Filters>Camera Raw Filter).
Camera Raw has a clarity slider.

One of the basic questions you have to ask is why variable as opposed to fixed. One issue with variable is that
they are not calibrated so you don't know how many stops you are set at. So getting the right exposure is trial and error.
If you are only using a few stops and you can still see the exposure then it's not a problem but If you are using 'a lot' of stops
you can't see the subject and getting the right exposure is trial and error. If you are using a fixed ND then you can easily calculate the correct exposure time
based on the normal exposure and the number of stops. For example, with a 10 stop filter, you multiply the normal exposure by a factor of 1024.
I have 3 fixed nd filters, 4,10 and 16 stops, all from HiTech/Formatt. I have also stacked the 4 10 and a Lee Circular polarizer to achieve ~16 stops.

What type of pen will write permanently on the back of an aluminum metal print.
I want it to be a limited edition and I want to add my name and the edition number.

I see comments recommending Old Car City. I was recently there and rather disappointed. Why? There are a lot of old rusty cars there covered with leaves and pine needled. They are in such bad shape that they almost become indistinguishable. I got a few good shots but felt that at $25 it wasn't worth it.

Will be going next week 10/17-21 to shoot the fall foliage. Would like to stop along the way for an hour or so to shot.
Prefer non-strenuos locatiohns. Also, appreciate heads-up on how the fall foliage is shaping up this year.

Thanks Jerry. All good suggestions. I will try to isolate the problem. Have never had a problem before.

I had a problem importing about 150 files from card reader to Lightroom on PC windows 10. The photos were from a sony a7rii, many of them taken with bracketing.
I do remember that when I tried to take an image the camera said iut wasn't ready because it was writing to the card.

The card is a sandisk extreme pro 64gb rated at 95 mb/s. The card reader is a Kingston.

Lightroom imported about 8 files and gave up saying it couldn't import the rest of them.

I deleted the files from the computer and went into the file system to copy the files from the card reader to the PC.

A few files were transferred and I kept getting error messages saying that a parameter ws=as missing or the file wasn't there. The error dialog gives the option of skipping or trying again.
I adopted the strategy of selecting "try again", sometimes multiple times, and eventually all files were transferred. I was then able to import all of them into Lightroom.

I

My question is-Is the card corrupted? Is there something wrong with the camera?
Could there be something wrong with the card reader?
If the files were corrupted, why would I eventually be able to transfer and import them?

Maybe it was born in there.

jpg

You are correct that a head is required if doing multi-row panos or if it is desired to not have the horizon in the vertical center for a one row pano. I have this set-up from really right stuff.
However you don't need to have a prime lens to use a nodal rail. I use the 'head' which includes a nodal rail with my 24-70 zoom lens. I calibrated the rail at 35, 50 and 70 mm so I restrict myself to using one of these focal lengths which are marked on the lens. I have found that since I shoot panos in vertical orientation I never use the lens at 24mm for panos. No problem getting good results with a zoom lens.

Ont thing to be aware of if you try to do a pano with a prominent object in the foreground is parallax error. The foreground object will appear to be in different places in each frame and stitching will be problematic. That is corrected by using a nodal rail. Also, to avoid having to do a lot of cropping in post-processing, the camera must be carefully levelled.

This is not correct. You must use usb cable for Sony.