I have been using Adobe Lightroom
since version 2, and I think it is a great, irreplaceable tool. Not only it offers great editing capabilities, but most importantly brings organization into my workflow. I admittedly don’t use Lightroom to the fullest extent of its capabilities, but I do know my ways around it. Yet, when I stumbled upon this video by Jamie Windsor, I added several useful tricks to my tool bag. Jamie presents 10 lesser known Lightroom features that I find really useful. One of the most impressive one, is the ability to sync your Lightroom edits to an online gallery. This works magically also in reverse, having comments and selections from the gallery sync back onto Lightroom. I haven’t incorporated the mobile workflow in my current operations yet, but this is so powerful that I will look into it in the future. The tricks that I did like the most so far are the following.
Auto match exposures
This allows you to quickly match the exposure among a set of images, regardless of the camera settings in each individual image. This is different from the simple setting synchronization.
Faster image rating
Use the CAPS key to lock in the image rating mode. This will make your image rating process so much faster, as the images progress automatically to the next one in the list.
Selective auto settings
While pressing SHIFT, double click on any slider and Lightroom will calculate the value it thinks to be best, based on the remaining settings. Note that this is not the same as using the “auto” button, which calculates and sets all values for you.
Edit local adjustment tools
Similar to masking in Photoshop, this trick might spare you a trip into a different editing tool
Increase the slider size
For finer tuning points, a larger slider makes the job easier
Conclusion
For the full list of tricks, watch Jamie in action in his video.
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Credits
- Featured image by João Silas on Unsplash
- Video by Jamie Windsor
