Saturday, August 22, 2015

Lightroom Tips and Tricks by John Williams

At this year’s CAPS- Chicago Area Photographic School sessions, we’re going to have a lot of fun going through all kinds of tips, techniques and tricks in LR to help you work faster and get more out of it including all those new features.

I hope everyone has had the chance to begin using the newest versions of Lightroom.  I say versions in plural because as you are probably aware, already there is a difference between Lightroom 6 and Lightroom CC 2015.  Here is a link to a feature comparison run down between Lightroom CC, Lightroom 6 and Lightroom 5 on Adobe’s website: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom/versions.html


While it’s always fun to talk about the newest features, today I want to drop back a bit to something basic in LR that even those of you running older versions can take advantage of.  In LR, we can spend a lot of time reviewing, inspecting and looking at the thumb nails and then the full screen and even the zoomed-in view of lots of photos.  So let’s speed things up and take advantage of a couple of keyboard shortcuts that help make it easier with the basic task of changing our image view. The more you know the LR user controls the faster and better you’ll be!

So just like Adobe uses this shortcut in Photoshop, remember you can use the Control key for Windows or Command key for Mac along with the Plus/Equals “+” or “=” key to zoom in or with the Minus “–“ key to zoom out. It will increment between five views, go in from the thumbnail to “Fit”, to “Fill”, to 1:1, to 2:1 and back all the way out to the Grid/Thumbnail view, just using those two keys. 

  
Note that the most zoomed level as shown in the Navigator panel can be set by you, using the pull down.  In my photo examples, I set that position to 3:1 instead of 2:1.


You can also use the “space bar” key to quickly move from the Grid/Thumbnail, to “Fit” view, then hit the space bar again to change to the 1:1 view.  Keep hitting the space bar to move in and out between the two views you last selected.  Now that’s fast!

You can also use the “Z” key from the thumbnail view and it will immediately take you to the 1:1, hit it again to go back to grid/thumbnail view.

Practice using these methods and as you become comfortable with them, I assure you, you will become much faster and more thorough working in Lightroom.

CAPS-Chicago Area Photographic School will be November 21st and 22nd at Elgin Community College.  Check out the CAPS homepage at:  Home

To register go to: 

John joined the Lake County Camera Club in 2008 and has served in many capacities and also had great success participating in club, CACCA and PSA competitions.  While he enjoys the challenges of learning many different photography types and styles, his favorites tend to be Architecture and landscapes. As an early adopter for HDR, panoramic and compositing processing techniques, he has always enjoyed the deep dive into more advanced photography processing technology. 

John has been teaching Lightroom to large and small groups through his club activities and takes a very practical and real life experience perspective on the full implementation of the software. He loves to share and teach with photographers of all levels and give back to the photography community.


John will be teaching on Sunday, November 22nd.


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