Here are five things that will make a huge difference to your Lightroom workflow by making you more efficient and saving you time.
1. Solo Mode
Do you get frustrated scrolling up and down the panels looking for the right adjustment or setting? If so, then your frustration is over. Right click on one of the panels and in the drop down menu, select Solo Mode. Solo Mode only allows you to have one panel open at a time, so every time you open a panel the last one you had opened, closes. This allows you to easily see all the panels at once and find what your looking for quickly.
2. Auto Advance
The best way to find your keeper images after a shoot is by using flags. All you need to do is use the keyboard shortcuts; P for pick, and X for reject. This is a super fast way to power through your shoots. The problem is once you pick or reject an image you need to then click a right or left arrow key or mouse click on the next image to make the next selection. That’s where Auto Advance comes in. To turn it on make sure you’re in the Library module, then in the menu under Photo select Auto Advance. With this enabled, each time you flag an image Lightroom will move to the next image in the film strip automatically. This may not sound like a huge thing but believe me, when you have several hundred images to sort through saving one keystroke on each image will save you heaps of time.
3. Quick Collections
Collections are super important in Lightroom. Using them is the best way to quickly switch between groups of images in the Develop module without switching back to the Library module and digging through your folders. Quick Collections is a term I’ve coined, but honestly this is the quickest way to create a collection. It’s really simple. Just grab a folder of images you want to make a collection from, then click and drag the folder to the collections panel. Once you see a blue bar appear, drop the folder and BOOM, instant collection.
4. Turning Off Auto Show Panels
To give you more real estate on the screen it’s a great idea to hide the side panels when you are not using them. The perfect place to do this is with left panel in the develop module as most of the time everything you need is in the right panel. The problem is once it’s hidden and every time you mouse over to the left of the screen the panel pops out. That might be fine a couple of times but after a while you’ll find that it becomes annoying and starts to slow down your workflow. It’s easily fixed by right clicking on the panel disclosure triangle, and selecting manual from the drop down menu. This will stop the panel from opening automatically. When you want it back, just click on the triangle to show the panel.
5. Decluttering the Lightroom Interface
Learning Lightroom can be very overwhelming especially when you see all the modules in the top bar and all the different panels and settings. There is so much going on in the interface, it can lead to what I call Lightroom burnout. The tip here is to turn off the modules and panels you aren’t using by cleaning up the interface. This allows you to only focus on just the things you are learning or need to use regularly. Just right click on the top bar or any of the panels, and in the drop down menu select what module or panel you want to hide, repeat the process to unhide.
Like a lot of software there are many ways to achieve the same outcome. I encourage you to keep refining your workflow until you find the perfect system that works for you. Give these five tips a go; they will not only save you time, but help you on your way to achieve what I call Lightroom bliss. That is when you get to a place using Lightroom where there’s no more frustration or confusion, and it’s just all about having fun with your photography and creating beautiful images.
