OK I apologise to those of you who don’t use Lightroom, if that includes you then it could be this post will make absolutely no sense at all, it’s really just for the Lightroom users among us. Also I’m a PC user (please forgive me) so these tips are based on the Windows keyboard but its all transferable. Sorry, but I can’t please everyone

So here we go.

1. Let me start by telling you how to get Lightroom to take over the entire screen and remove some of those menus too, easy just click ‘F’ and keep clicking it until you find your preferred viewing area. The ‘Tab’ key will add and remove the toolbars .
2. Spot removal, man I just hate dust on my images and I hate removing it even more, its so time consuming and downright dull. I recently stumbled onto a copule of little tricks that makes things a bit faster the first is in the develop module increase the Blacks to around 80% this, for most images, will make the dust spot stand out and make them faster to find
3. The second part is to remove the dust you should be viewing the image at 100%, the problem with viewing images at 100% is that they tend not to fit on the screen and involve clicking and dragging the image around to see the next part. Well it turns out that you can actually use your keyboard to do this and its much faster and more accurate. First zoom in to 100% click the ‘Home’ button on your keyboard and the viewable area will move to the top left hand side of the image, now you can use the ‘Page down’ button to navigate the image, when you reach the bottom and click ‘Page down’ the focus will automatically move to the next column. Try it, it works really well.
4. Want to gain accurate exposure in Lightroom? well it would help to know exactly where the pure white points are, so when adjusting the exposure hold down ‘Alt’ and a slightly underexposed the image will turn black, as you increase the exposure white points will appear these are pure 100% white and will contain no detail at all. Similarly you can do the same for the blacks with the ‘Blacks’ slider.
5. Want to compare changes you’ve made to an image and to be able to see before and after versions? Well in the develop module just click ‘y’ to view the changes from the orriginal file. But what if you wanted to view changes from just the last few steps? Fortunately the guys at Adobe have thought of that too. You can set the ‘before’ state to be any previous state in the history of the image by simply right clicking the setting from the history menu and choosing  ’Copy History Step Settings to Before’Now you can easily see if the changes you’ve just made improves your image, or just makes it look naff.
6. Ever tried to add a graduated filter to an image only to struggle to get it horizontal? try holding down shift when drag out the gradient and it will be perfectly aligned. Genius.
7. If you ever use Lightroom on a laptop then I strongly recommend you download Gavin Gough’s greyscale gradient ID plate. Its a very simple, but yet incredibly ingenious little thing, that will ensure your monitor is set to the correct angle and that you can see a full range of tones
8. When using the adjustment brush did you know you can paint over an area many times, this is particularly useful with the clarity setting as sometime 100% clarity just isn’t enough, to speed up your workflow even more just press enter to start a new brush.
9. Want a more sensitive slider in the develop module? Simple just increase the width of the panel by hovering the mouse on the panel edge and click and dragging it to the left. This will give you more control over your adjustments.
10. Keyboard shortcuts. No doubt about it they can save a heck of a lot of time but what are they? which once do you need to know? well no mater which module your in, just by clicking ‘Ctrl + /’ a list will pop up of all the available keyboard shortcuts for that module, easy to find and always available, one shortcut that isn’t on the list and can be extremely handy after several hours of processing is the good old  ’Ctrl + Q’

As always the comments are open for your town tips.

Tags: Lightroom, tips, tips & tricks