5 Quick and Easy Lightroom Tricks Every User Should Know

Just because you love Adobe Lightroom doesn't mean that you want to spend a lot of time using it. If you’d rather be shooting, use these tips to work through your images rapidly.

1. Use Caps Lock for Auto Advance When you want to work rapidly in the Library module, a great trick is to hit the Caps Lock button on the keyboard of your laptop from Beachcamera.com. When Caps Lock is on, you can use keyboard shortcuts to add metadata to an image and automatically move on to the next image. Once Auto Advance is on, you can work through images quickly with single key presses, and Lightroom keeps the shoot moving!

2. Edit from Smart Previews Smart Previews are like magic. Lightroom can build smaller versions of your images in your Lightroom catalog so that you can keep editing when you disconnect. This is really useful for laptop users with huge image libraries on external drives. When it's time to leave your hard drive at home and hit the road, you can keep editing thanks to Smart Preview.
3. Lights Out Mode Focuses on the Image Sometimes, you’ll want to focus on the images you’re working with—not the Lightroom interface. That's where Lights Out mode comes into play. To enter Lights Out mode, press the L key on your keyboard in the Library module. The area around the image dims, and your image looks nice and clean. Tap it again to totally black out the area around the image. Pressing the L a third time resets the view. The key here is dimming the interface to temporarily focus on an image.

4. Add Your Logo to Lightroom Let's get personal with Lightroom's Identity Plate feature. With this feature, you can add your own logo or image to the upper left corner of Adobe Lightroom. Go to the Lightroom > Identity Plate Setup menu to customize your workspace. On the Identity Plate dropdown, choose Personalized. You can use either custom text, or a transparent PNG image to personalize Lightroom. Identity plates are perfect if you use Lightroom to showcase images taken with your Mirrorless Panasonic Camera from Beachcamera.com to clients. That personal touch makes Lightroom feel like a branded studio app.
   
   
5. Watch Out for Clipping! Clipping refers to the loss of highlight or shadow detail. Basically, when you push an image too far in post-production, highlights will be blown out or shadows will lose any meaningful detail. This can certainly happen during the capture of an image when we overexpose or underexpose, but it can also be introduced in post-production. You can avoid that by pressing the letter J on your keyboard in the Develop module. Or click the little triangles in the upper corners of the Histogram to toggle the feature on. Tap the J button in Lightroom to toggle on peaking previews. The red areas indicate where the highlights will be blown out, while blue indicates loss of detail in shadows. Pull the sliders back into range if you want to avoid peaking.

These tips are meant to reduce the time you spend in the digital darkroom so you can spend more time actually taking photos!