7 Really Useful Lightroom Shortcuts
Happy Monday everybody (I know, that’s an oxymoron). 😉
I thought I’d kick off this week with some of my favorite Lightroom keyboard shortcuts — some of these I use daily and some I just think are so handy and I hope you find them helpful (note: yes, I’ve mentioned some of these here before). Here goes:
1. When you’re using the Gradient filter, you can flip the direction of the gradient by pressing the ‘ key (apostrophe)
2. If you’re wondering if a certain image would look good in black & white, just press the letter “v” and it shows you the black & white version. When you’re done, press “v’ to return to full color version (or, if you fell in love with the black & white version, don’t).
3. When you’re cropping, press “x” to toggle between a horizontal and vertical crop
4. If you don’t like the area where the Spot Removal tool chose as the source for your spot removal, press the ‘ / ‘ key (slash) and it will pick a different area.
5. Press the letter “o” when you’re painting with the Adjustment Brush to not only see the area you’re painting on appear in a red tint, but it’s stays “on” so you can continue painting. This is really handy when you’re painting over a large area (maybe a sky) and you want to make sure you didn’t miss any areas.
6. Hold the Shift key, then Double-click the Whites and Blacks slider to have Lightroom automatically set your white and black points for you
7. If you’re using the Spot Removal tool to remove wrinkles, but you don’t want to “remove” them, you just want to “reduce” them, try this: right after you use the tool to remove the wrinkle, go to the Spot Removal tool’s Opacity slider and lower the opacity to bring some of the wrinkles back. That way, their wrinkles are reduced rather than removed. This is also handy if you’re retouching a facial feature like a mole, where if you remove it everyone that knows the person will realize the photo has been retouched, so in that case, don’t remove it — just reduce it’s impact.
That’s a quick seven to get us up and running this Monday. Hope you see you here again tomorrow. 🙂
Best,
-Scott
