Some of our most popular Lightroom posts lately have been some tips and tricks that many people don’t know about in Lightroom. I wanted to continue that today and give you all 5 more Lightroom tips. Lightroom is one of those programs that the more you can use shortcut keys and learn all the hidden features it becomes a breeze to use and you can navigate through it super fast. I hope these help and give you some new tricks.
#1 – Turn out the lights – Well not literally but there is a Lights on/off feature of Lightroom. Say you are looking at a bunch of images in the Library view and wanted to really focus on just a few. If you select some images and the click the L key you will enter the Lights off mode. The first time you click L you will see the images you selected with the rest of the screen faded. This lets your selections pop out from the clutter. You can click L again to have the rest of the screen go totally black and then L a 3rd time to go back to the normal view.
#2 – Use keyboard shortcuts – There are tons of keyboard shortcuts for Lightroom and these will help speed you up so much. Here is just a few of the best shortcuts to remember:
A: A toggles Auto Mask when using Adjustment brush
C: Compare
D: Develop
E: Loupe
F: Full Screen
G: Grid
M: Graduated Filter
R: Crop
W: White Balance
X: Reject
Y: Before/After view
If you want to see the full list of shortcuts for the module that you are in just click the Command + / keys to show an overlay of shortcuts (Crtl + / for pc)
#3 – Reset Your Sliders – Holding down Option (Alt) in the develop module turns control titles into reset buttons but it’s even easier to reset any of the sliders in the develop module to their original position. Just double click on the name of the slider and it will revert to its original position. You can also reset the entire group by clicking on the main group name. For example if you want to reset the sliders for Exposure, Recovery, Fill Light, Blacks, Brightness and contrast all at once just double click the Tone button at the top.
#4 – Use the Luminance Sliders to Adjust colors – One of the most overlooked sections of Lightroom I think is the HSL module (which stands for Hue, Saturation and Luminance). If you really want to bring a color back head over to this section in the develop module and inside the HSL module click on Luminance. Here is a great example of when adjusting the luminance can come in handy. It’s a typical bright sunny day wedding shot and the sky is fairly washed out (left part of image is unprocessed). A quick adjustment of the blue in the luminance and Bam, perfect popping blue sky.
#5 – Straighten your Photo with a crop – One really cool trick is using the crop tool in the Develop module. The keyboard shortcut to get to the crop tool is the R key. Once you are in the crop mode then click Command on Mac ( Control on PC). While clicking Command click on a point and drag a line showing Lightroom where to rotate to make that image straight. This is a really quick and easy way to straighten out a photo.
If you missed our past articles and want to learn more about Lightroom check these out:
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