by Peter Zack

  

We’ve decided to start a new series of editing tips here on EtL. Every once in awhile when the inspiration hits or we come across something new, we’ll put up a new tip on the site. We hope they help you speed up your workflow and make editing more fun, easier and creative.
Instead of huge tutorials, these will be simple little tips to make life with Lightroom 3 just a little bit simpler.

You will find all of these in our menu above. Look for “lessons” and find ‘Lightroom tip of the day’ in the scroll down menu.

So here’s tip 1:

So let’s say you have 100 photos loaded in Lightroom and they are taken in various lighting conditions. In this example, you’ve corrected a series of photos taken in artificial light and then the next shot was taken outside under very different light. The following photo is back indoors. You want to sync the previous photos with the last one. So you could export the middle shot and then delete it from the set, moving the last photo beside the previous one. Or you could do this simple shortcut.

Highlight the previous indoor photos that have been corrected the way you want them. Now move the mouse to the center of the thumbnail of the photo that needs to be sync’d with the previous set. Hold down the (sorry I use a PC) Ctrl button and left mouse click the thumbnail. Now the last photo(s) is added to the set to be sync’d. You can now select which photo is the one you want to Sync from. To do this, click on the center of that photo’s thumbnail. It will highlight a bit brighter and all photos will sync from what was done to that photo.

Note: If you click on the border of that thumbnail, you’ll lose the selection of the other photos. See the example photo above. The cool thing is you can continue to select random photos from the thumbnails, as many as you require. Just scroll through all the thumbnails and repeat the process using the Ctrl button.

A little bonus tip. Did you know that you can quickly select a set of photos using the shift key and a single click of the mouse? Again lets say you have 100 photos loaded. You may only want to edit a group of 10 similar shots or apply a preset to just those. You can click one to select it, next hold down the Shift key then hold down the left or right arrows to select those ten. Or a faster way is to select the first shot in the set with a click of the mouse, hold the shift key and then left click the last photo of the set. All the photos in sequence will be highlighted. You can do this for any number of shots and it might not save hours but it’s quicker and more accurate.

Why you would want to know this is simple. Lets say you have 500 photos in LR. You want to make a global change to 300 of them or delete them (or any many other bulk tasks). Highlighting the first photo of those 300 and sitting there with one finger on the shift key while holding down the right or left arrow can take quite a while if there were 300 to select. Now this way, you highlight the first shot then use the scroll bar (very bottom of the screen) to move left or right to the last shot. Now hold down the shift key, click the left button on the center of the last image and voilà! The whole set is ready for that task.

Finally, combine both tips. See the second photo of Lightroom above. I highlighted 4 photos using our bonus tip. Then used the Ctrl key to add some random shots to that selected group.

Cheers and good shooting
-Peter Zack

Related posts:

1. Lightroom Tip of the Day. Adjustment Brush Tools – Reset Sliders and Pins. Part 2
2. Lightroom Tip of the Day. Adjustment Brush Tools – Zooming. Part 3
3. Lightroom Tip of the Day. Adjustment Brush Tools – Creating Bokeh. Part 4
4. Adobe Photoshop CS5 at a Great New Price. Also Lightroom 3
5. Adobe Lightroom 3 Now Available for Purchase