Essential Shortcuts for Lightroom’s Develop Module

[Adobe TV presents] [The Complete Picture] [with Julieanne Kost] Hi, and welcome--my name is Julieanne Kost and in today's of The Complete Picture, we're going to take a look at some of the key shortcuts for the Develop Module in Lightroom. Now, I recorded other episodes. One of them was called Create Stunning Images, Converting Your Images to Black and White, and Enhancing the Light. And all three of those videos really teach you how to use the sliders in the Develop Module. That's not what this episode's all about--this episode is all about how to become more productive with the interface. So these are great shortcuts and tips. Let's start by going to the Develop Module. I'm going to tap the D key--D key will always take you to the Develop Module. The first thing I want to start with is just right-clicking in this gray area behind your image-- or Control-clicking, if you have a one-button mouse. You'll notice that. when you click in that gray area, you can now choose from all of these different background colors. Now, I would suggest that you set this to light gray because that's going to help avoid an underexposure when you're adjusting and you have all this other interface behind you. But, if you knew--for example--that you were going to print these and overmat them with a white mat, you might want to take a look at what this would look like. Similarly, you might want to see what they look like against black. Again, it's up to you with your preference but if you are doing Color Critical Work, I would go ahead and set this to light gray. It gives a nice gray background with no color in it, and also will help with getting the correct exposure. Okay--next, let's scoot over here to our panels. This shortcut works in all of the different modules. Basically, it's the ability to go back and forth between the regular view of all of your panels and how they work, and Solo Mode. There are two ways to get to Solo Mode--you can either hold down the Control key or right-mouse click on any of the panel headers. You'll notice--right down here--here is Solo Mode. You'll also notice that you can turn off any of the panels or hide any of the panels that you don't want to see. I'm going to leave them all showing, but go into Solo Mode. Now--what that does is, it changes the way the panels behave in that it only allows one panel to be open at a time, which is excellent if you're working on a laptop. So--for example--right now, I have the basic panel open. But if I wanted to open up the Split Toning panel--what Solo Mode does it it opens Split Toning, and closes the basic panel so that you're not left scrolling and scrolling and scrolling through all those panels. Whatever panel you click on, it will close the other panel and just show you that one panel. Sometimes, you might want two panels open. In this case, I would leave it in Solo Mode and hold down the Shift key and click that secondary panel. Now you can see that I've got the Split Toning and the Effects panel open because I know that when you're working--like on a laptop or when I'm recording these videos, I have a very limited amount of space. When I'm home on my cinema display, it really doesn't matter that much because I have all this space on both sides of my monitor. All of these panels also have keyboard shortcuts associated with them. So Command 1through 9, in this case--or, depending on which module you're in,. obviously, because they have differing numbers of panels-- you can quickly go to that panel. So Command+1--or Control+1 on Windows--would take you to Basic. Two takes you to the Tone curve, HSL, Split Toning, Detail, Lens Correction, etc., etc. Again, that's just the Command key--or the Control key on Windows, plus the number for that panel. The other way you could go to Solo Mode quickly is simply by holding down the Option key, or the Alt key, and clicking on this disclosure triangle right here. See how it looks like it's made of dots right now? That tells me that Solo Mode is on. If I Option or Alt click on that, it will become solid, and it takes me out of Solo Mode. But clicking it again will turn that back on for me. How about working with sliders? By now, you've probably figured out that when you click a slider and you move to a different value, the easiest way to reset your slider is simply to double click on the slider's name. And that's great for individual sliders, but what if you come down here-- say to this Presence area and you change the Clarity amount and maybe you change your Vibrance amount a little, and now, actually you're like, I really don't like the image. I just want to reset everything within that Presence area See how it's kind of subdivided-- it's kind of its own little sub-panel on the Basic panel? Well, if I hold down the Option or the Alt key, you'll notice that Presence changes to Reset Presence, so all I need do is click on that and it will reset all of those sliders at one time. That's a great way to just simply reset a certain area. In addition, all of the panels, except for the Basic panel, have this little lightswitch that you can toggle on and off. Let's go to Split Toning for a minute and let's go ahead--say we wanted to add, maybe a red cast to our shadows, and a little bit of a yellow cast here to our highlights.. Now I want to see what it would look like, with and without, all of those changes made in that single panel. I can toggle the lightswitch to turn on and off just that panel. It's really nice too, because I can leave this off and then keep working in other areas, and then toggle it back on, as I need it. Since we're talking about going back and forth in time, let's talk a little bit about history. The easiest way to view kind of a before and after so you can see what you've been doing, is to tap the Y key The Y key will take you to whichever of these options you last used-- so, either Before/After, Left/Right, Left/Right Split, Top/Bottom, or Top/Bottom Split. But a little known keyboard shortcut--Shift+Y--will take you to the other option of those two. Now, I know that didn't make sense, but let me explain. If the default was Before/After, Left/Right, Shift+Y takes you to Before/After, Left/Right Split, or if you were in Before/After, Top/Bottom--like this-- Shift+Y would take you to Before/After, Top/Bottom Split, like that. And the opposite works as well, so--for example-- if you wanted to look at this Before/After, Left/Right Split, then Shift+Y would show them side by side. One of the things that I hear people talk about when they're viewing this Before and After view is that the before always goes too far back in time. If we scroll down here, it's going to go all the way back in history to when you imported the image. But did you know that if you want to compare two different states, like--for example-- let's say I like this kind of fiery-orange state, I can drag this over here to the before, so now I can compare the Before and After that way or if I come up here and I want to come see this state in history, I just drag it to the Before state. Now since I've mentioned that, I know that someone's going to ask me: What about snapshots--can I drag a snapshot to the Before state? Well--you can try, but it bounces back. What you need to know is that you can right-mouse click or Control click on any of these snapshots and copy the snapshot setting to Before. So now we can compare any state in history and any snapshot that we've taken to our current working image. Okay--what about clipping? Let me tap the Y key--we'll come back to our full-screen of our image here. Clipping is important because it's going to display any pixels--any pixels in your image-- that have been taken all the way to pure white or pure black so there's no detail in that shadow or highlight area. Over here in the histogram, we can position our cursor or roll over these triangles here to see if we have any clipping and if we did--let's actually make some here by pushing our blacks over too far. If we were clipping some areas to pure black, when we position our cursor on top of that triangle, you can see in the image that we get that little blue overlay. Likewise, if we were to take this to the extreme exposure and we rolled over our cursor on to the triangle on the right, anything that's pure white would then be shown with a red overlay. So it's nice that we can roll over these, but we can also click on the triangle and that way we can make adjustments; and we can actually watch interactively. Those values that are clipped are now brought down into a printable range. That's by clicking on them but, honestly, you can also just tap the J key. The J key will toggle on and off your Clipping overlay so that you can see if you're under or overexposing any of your image. All right--another way to see if you're clipping any values-- if you don't want to use that overlay--is simply holding down the Option or the Alt key as you drag your black slider. You can see, as I drag my black slider over to the right, we're getting a previewof those values that are being clipped to pure black. If I were to let go of my slider, in the option we can see--yep--those are pure black now. I really don't want to push those values to pure black--I like detail in my shadows-- so I would back off from that to about--there. Okay--some real quick, easy shortcuts with the Crop tool: You've probably noticed by now that the Crop tool keyboard shortcut is R-- not C--if you're a longtime Photoshop user. The reason for that is just that it just makes more sense, plus the C tool is already given to Compare Mode in the Library Module-- so R for Crop because it's great and it Resizes and Rotates the images. R will get you to the Crop tool, but X will actually change the crop from vertical to horizontal and vice versa. It can be a real quick way--if you go in there, you tap the R key--you've got a vertical, you want to make it a horizontal--tap the X key, and it will shift the crop marquis and then, obviously, you can reposition that to however you want it. Typing the Enter or Return key, obviously, applies that crop. Another great shortcut is the W key. W key goes to White Balance and this actually works from the Library Module as well. Sometimes I'll be there Library and I'll just be like, Ah--I just want to see what this image looks like with a corrected white balance, tap the W key, it takes you here to the Develop Module, and gives you the White Balance tool. The other reason that I like it is, I do set the white balance to Auto Dismiss, which means I'm going to click once and it's going to disappear. It's going to reset it, because it's assuming that I'm good, and I can just click once and nail it. I do like that--by default--but sometimes you click, and you don't quite get it right so it's really nice to be able to just tap the W key again and it'll keep just giving you that tool. Of course, if you want to click all over the place, then maybe it's better that you take off the Auto Dismiss option there. So--how about curves? One of the things that I see people missing when they're using the Develop Module is a new feature in Lightroom 3 and that is the ability to have a point curve. Let me just hide my filmstrip here for a minute so we can see it. Right down here--in the lower right-hand corner of the Tone Curve--. you see this little icon right here? If we click on that, it actually gives us a curve that we can add points to-- we can add as many points as we want to. If you did learn Curves in Photoshop and you prefer this interface, as opposed to the parametric curve where you simply click but it doesn't really add a point to your curve-- well it is, but you can't really see it--it's up to you which one you like. Just don't miss it--because the only way you know about it is this little teeny icon right here. Of course, once you create a curve, you can go in here and you can save out that curve. So if you like things really contrasty, you can make a super-high contrast curve and then save that out so you don't have to continuously recreate that curve. How about spot removal? If you have a spot in your image, the keyboard shortcut has changed between Lightroom 2 and Lightroom 3--it is now the Q key. So if you tap Q, you will get the Spot Removal--right here--and you'll notice here that we've got a Size and Opacity slider that you can change. The right bracket is going to give you an increase or decrease in size there. The other great shortcut to know, of course, is the H key. After you have removed a spot and you've repositioned the source area, it's really nice to know that the H key will hide that, so you can see if it's seamlessly removing that spot. You just tap the H key and it will go ahead and show it again. Another great shortcut is the Home key. Now, let's say I've zoomed in to One-to-one and I tap home. What that does is it takes me to the upper left section of my image and it presents it as large as it can at One-to-one which is, obviously, what I have preference set to here. It shows me that area; then I can use the Page Down key. and if you watch the navigator, you'll see what's going on here--I'm actually paging down through my image so that I can quickly go and look, and see if there are any spots. This kind of takes the guesswork out of it. In fact--did you notice, when I went all the way to the bottom, I hit Page Down again. It took me to the next column to go through, so I can quickly comb through my entire image to see if there are any dust spots from the sensor or maybe a bird in the sky--whatever it is that you want to get rid of. So that should be helpful. And then, of course, once you're finished with that--when you zoom out, if you do have something like dust on your sensor, you could then select--using the filmstrip--all of the rest of the images that were shot with that same lens/camera combination with that dust spot and you could synchronize those, using the Sync button. Let me just show my filmstrip there so we can see--once I've got a number of images selected, we've got a Sync button and we could simply check "None" and then just turn on Spot Removal and it would synchronize that spot removal-- even if your images rotate, from vertical to horizontal. Because--even though you're moving your camera, the dust is probably going to stay in the same spot. So we will go ahead and add that spot removal on each one of those images. You'll definitely want to go in and check each photograph to make sure that it's grabbing from a source area that's applicable, that makes a nice seamless repair. Finally, let's talk just a wee bit about the Adjustment Brush. These shortcuts, when applicable, also apply to the Graduated Filter. First of all, with the Adjustment Brush--how do you make a larger or smaller brush? Well, the right bracket is going to make a larger brush and the left bracket is going to make a smaller brush. You'll notice--if I add this Shift key to that--it's going to change the feather amount, making it a softer or a harder-edged brush. Also, if I want to change from the Brush to the Eraser-- let's say, for example, I am trying to increase the exposure-- and I'm going to make it super obvious so we see what we're doing here-- Let's say I'm trying to increase the exposure on this tree trunk. Okay--well, that's a little too obvious, so we can decrease that a bit. But let's say that's the way I like the exposure, but I've gone too far-- maybe I went out over in this area. If I want to quickly just swap to the Eraser, hold down the Option key. I also have a little wheel on my mouse, so I can go ahead and increase the brush size that way--oh, look, but I've got a hard-edged brush. So what do I want to do? I want to set up--with my Eraser tool, let's set up the feather so it's the same as my brush-- and that way, I'll get a nice, soft brush. When I hold down the Option key, we could just remove the dodging from that area. If you go to the trouble to set up both Brush A and B--let's say, for example, Brush A is going to have a really soft edge, and Brush B is going to have a really hard edge. In order to toggle between those two, you can just use the Forward Slash key and it will go between Brush A and Brush B. The A key turns on and off the Auto Mask feature. If I want to see--right now, gosh, I can't even see the pen--sorry. I'd better tap the H key--the H key Hide and Shows the pen. The O key shows the overlay--basically, that's the mask. If you don't want red, but you want some other color, you can hold down the Shift key and tap O and it'll cycle through, either red or green or gray or kind of a darker value there so that you can see where the mask is. Again, tapping the O key will go ahead and hide that overlay. Tapping the H key hides the pen. One last thing with the pen--if you've made a variety of changes-- now I just want you to watch over here-- I don't really care what's happening to the image at the moment, but if I've made more than one change-- meaning maybe I've increased exposure, and I've decreased saturation, and I've increased clarity--I've made these three options. I love the position of my mask. It's just that it's too much--too much of everything. If it was just too much exposure, then we could just move the Exposure slider. But what if I want an effect similar to Photoshop, where you do something to a layer and the whole layer's too much, so you just want to take down the opacity of the layer? You can tone back all three sliders at once if you just position you cursor on top of the pen, and click and drag to the left to decrease--see, look--all those sliders moved at once in relationship to each other. Move it to the right in order to increase the effect. Of course, once you have settings set for either the Adjustment Brush or the Graduated Filter, you definitely want to take advantage of the fact that you can save these settings as a new preset so that you can use them over and over again. I know I'm out of time but--one more shortcut and that is the ability to now turn on Auto Sync. If you've got five images and you know that what you're doing to one image you want to happen to all of them, you can turn on Auto Sync. Select them down here in the film strip and then watch what happens if I tap the V key-- V as in Victor--V takes you to Black and White; although it looks like I've got some Split Toning applied here. But look what 's happening down here in my filmstrip. You will notice that all of the images that I have selected have all changed because I have that Auto Sync button turned on. So be careful--don't forget that you turned it on. It's a little dangerous if, say, you've got your filmstrip hidden. Excellent--that wraps up this episode of The Complete Picture. I hope that these shortcuts will help you be more productive in the Develop Module. I will just mention, I do have a blog--it's blogs.Adobe.com/jkost--J-K-O-S-T-- and there, I have posted all of these keyboard shortcuts, plus many, many more. There are hundreds of shortcuts for Photoshop, so please take advantage of that as well-- very easy to use that little box in the upper right to hit Search and find exactly what you're looking for. My name's Julieanne Kost--thanks again for joining me. I hope to see you again on the next episode of The Complete Picture. [♪soft music] [Executive Producer Bob Donlon] [Producer Karl Miller] [Director Kush Amerasinghe] [Post-Production Erik Espera] [ADOBE TV PRODUCTIONS]