For both pros and beginners, Adobe Lightroom is a great tool. Photographers mostly use Lightroom, but web writers can also get some use out of it. One of the best things about Lightroom is that it lets you manage all of your photos. You can use this as a web designer to keep pictures in order by client. One more great thing about Adobe Lightroom is that it lets you edit photos quickly and easily. This is very helpful when you need to edit hundreds of pictures in the same way. A great way to improve and speed up your work is to learn how to use Lightroom properly if you’re just starting with it. Today, we’re going to talk about 10 Adobe Lightroom tips and tricks. 

Tips For Better Editing In Lightroom

Want some Lightroom tips and tricks to help you work faster, make your changes better, and improve your workflow? You are in the right place.I’ve been using Lightroom for more than ten years. In this piece, I share the best tips I’ve learned, such as:

Let’s do this!

Use Smart Previews To Work and know Lightroom Tips And Tricks

If you keep your photos on a separate hard drive, Smart Previews will be great for you. This feature makes a smaller copy of a picture so that you can edit it even if you take the hard drive out of the computer. Because Smart Previews are smaller files than original pictures, it also helps Lightroom run faster. Go to Preferences > Performance to turn on Smart Previews. Next, make sure the box next to Use Smart Previews instead of Originals is checked.

Sort Your Pictures

Let’s talk about some great ways to arrange your pictures right away before you even start changing them. Like me, you probably take a lot of pictures when you’re out shooting. One of the hardest parts of editing is going through all of your images one by one and choosing which ones you even want to edit. Before I formed some good habits, this used to drive me crazy.

This is especially true when I’m going on longer trips or taking a lot of pictures of wildlife or sports events without even putting them on my computer. What’s the best way to organize your photos before you start editing them? The good news is that Lightroom has some great tools that make this process simple.

After that, I’ll open up the library and start going through each picture one by one. I will quickly get rid of any blurry images, out of focus or just don’t look good to me. I try to get rid of at least 50–75% of them right away. One good way to do this is to mark them as you go through the box. To get rid of pictures, press “X,” and to keep them, press “P.” At the end, you can delete all the rejected images at once.

Change The Camera’s Defaults

For portraits, you might love your Canon DSLR, but for just walking around town, you might like your Sony point and shoot more. They know that each camera has its quirks because they use a variety of them. No matter what camera you used to take the pictures, they will need a slightly different edit.

This is a great Lightroom workflow tip: you can easily change the settings that are applied to downloaded files based on what camera they came from. This will make editing go much faster. Press and hold the alt key while you’re in the Develop module. This choice will show up in the bottom right corner. You can make as many unique Lightroom themes as you want. This is a great way to speed up the editing process. If you decide to sell your Lightroom presets, it can also be a great way to make extra cash!

You Can Make Your Own Presets And Use Them When You Import

When we talk about presets, you can make your own preset from changes you’ve already made to your process. Just make changes to a picture and click the plus sign in the Presets panel. In the next window, make sure all the choices you want to use are checked off. Give the preset a name, and then click the OK button. After that, you can right-click on that setting and choose “Apply on Import.” 

Use CAPS LOCK To Move Photos Ahead Automatically

After Putting in Metadata In the Library module, you can quickly add metadata to your pictures by pressing shortcut keys. The P and X keys let you mark photos as “Pick” or “Reject,” and the numbers keys let you add stars and flags to make things easier to find. When you press the CAPS LOCK key together with Lightroom, it will move on to the next picture automatically after you’ve marked the current photo and added the metadata you want. 

Make Your Picture Stand Out

Having the ability to separate your picture from the background is a great tool to have. Illustrator is a fairly complicated program that surrounds your image with a lot of windows and information. This information can be too much to handle and take your attention away from the image you are trying to change. These are some ways to separate your picture and make it stand out. 

Just press the “L” key to make the windows and text around a picture darker. You can switch between a dark background, a completely black background, and the normal view by pressing the “L” key more than once. This lets you see the picture with fewer things getting in the way. The background can be a different color as well.This picture might be printed and hung on a white wall, or it might be in a magazine with a white paper background. You might also want a completely black background. To change the background color, just right-click on the area around the picture and select the color you want.

Finally, you can enter Fullscreen mode by pressing the “F” key. This will make your picture take up the whole screen or monitor. To get back to the regular view, just press the “F” key again.

Just Reset The Sliders Quickly

After working with different scales, you don’t have to move them all the way back to zero if you don’t like the result. If you double-click on the name of the slider, it will go back to its original number. If you hold down the ALT key, the slider’s name will change to a link that lets you start over.

Change The Color Of The Background 

If you have a picture that is very bright or very dark, changing the background color in Lightroom can help the tones in your image look better. Choosing whether to place your printed pictures on a white or black frame is the same idea. To check if your picture needs to be brightened, use a white background. To check how dark your picture is, use a black background. When we look at an image on a screen that is backlit, we often think it is too bright. Seeing it against true white may help us get the levels right. 

To change the color, right-click on the empty spot around your picture and pick a color.

Use Auto Mask 

How long did it take you to clean the edges of your brush tool after drawing over something small and specific? You’ll wish you had found the auto mask tool sooner because it saves you so much time when editing. 

To use an auto mask, pick up the brush tool and go to the very bottom of the workspace. If you make sure the auto mask box is checked, you won’t be able to “color outside the lines” when you use the brush on your picture. It finds the tones and brightness levels in your image that it thinks you want to change and then makes changes to them. But if you try to brush over something that has tones that are close to it, it won’t always work perfectly. We suggest that you zoom in so that you can use the brush tool more accurately in this case.

Sliders That Are Longer 

It is easy to make big changes to the sliders while editing, especially if you are using a small screen. Grab the panel’s edge and drag it out toward the picture to make it bigger. You can now use the buttons more accurately.  

Final Words

Again, Lightroom is a very powerful, widely used, and well-known picture editing program. There are a lot of moving parts in this useful Adobe app. But if you learn how it works and find its hidden gems, you can upgrade your shooting to a whole new level. I hope this post was useful and interesting and that it makes you want to try some new things the next time you edit photos.