5 Time-Saving Tips for Adobe Lightroom

Photographers everywhere have embraced Adobe Lightroom as a godsend—a tool that saves countless hours, catering exactly to photographers’ needs in incredible detail. The problem is that most of those details are tucked away in unseen corners of the program. In the video below, Mark Wallace shows us five time-saving tricks for a more fluent editing experience:

The last technique—a customized export structure using published folder sets—is way too complex to write out here; it’s probably best understood by watching the video. (Skip to 7:32 if you’re interested in that.) But the other four are pretty simple:

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  1. Use keyboard shortcuts. Need to crop an image? Don’t click the little icon—just hit R. For white balance, tap W. To find a whole list of handy keyboard shortcuts, you can click Command (for Macs) or Control (for PCs) and /.
  2. Clean up your panels. You can toggle between which panels are visible by hitting Tab or Shift and Tab together. You can also right click on the leftmost ones to collapse them all or make them or work in Solo Mode, where only the selected panel is open.
  3. Use crop guide overlays. When cropping a photo, click Tools in the menu bar, then head to Tool Overlay and click “Always Show.” That will show a grid over your crop to help you size it out. You can change the grid to a diagonal, spiral or particular aspect ratio under Tools – Crop Guide Overlay, or simply click the hotkey O on the image to cycle through them.
  4. Make custom keyword sets. If you shoot similar photos—wedding shots, landscapes, etc.—and find yourself using the same keywords again and again, rather than type them in each time, you should use the built-in keyword option. When clicked on the right-hand panel, they’ll apply to every image selected. To create your own, go to Edit Set, delete the preexisting ones and save the new set as any title you want.

What are your favorite Lightroom time savers?

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