Photoshop Lightroom: Top 5 Features & Tips

I'm a Photoshop Lightroom user. The slick, photographer-oriented workflow has helped me to get through the large pile of images I return with after a shoot and to get my selects online quickly. Here are my (current) five favorite Lightroom Features & Tips in no particular order.

1. Disable Lightroom Sharpening - In an apparent oversight, there is no obvious way to disable the default sharpening (25) that is applied to all of your images. While this isn't a big deal if you're just cranking out a bunch of event pics for small-format prints, when you're working a hero image in Photoshop for a large fine art print you never want to sharpen until the very end!

Though it isn't difficult to follow my steps to disable Lightroom sharpening with a saved preset, I believe that Adobe will be including a more straightforward approach in a future release (Lightroom 1.1 perhaps?). Why? This blog gets more hits for "disable sharpening lightroom" than for most other search terms combined - clearly it's a feature that people want!

2. Make Judicious Use of Snapshots - Finally, a way to create multiple versions of an image without eating up tons of drive space! Since Lightroom is a metadata editor (as opposed to a pixel editor), when you make adjustments to an image you're really just building a "recipe" of moves that will take place upon exporting your photographs. These recipes only take up a fraction of the space that a full image does and Lightroom Snapshots let you associate multiple recipes with a single image.

Once you have an image tweaked just the way you want it, save a snapshot of those settings. Just click the "+" (plus sign) next to the Snapshots area on the left & give your settings a name. This is a great way to have a custom color, b&w, and other flavors of the same image that you can switch between depending on your need.

3. Virtual Copies for Real Results - Along the same lines as the Snapshots are Virtual Copies. A virtual copy is just an entry in the Lightroom database that shares the same pixels stored in your original image, but uses its own develop recipe. The virtual copy appears next to your original image in the library and behaves identically to a "real" photograph.

Combine this idea with the Snapshots and you can have a Black and White, Color, and Sepia version of the same photograph in your library, ready for export. The benefit is that even though you now have three individual images you're still only using the disk space required by the original image. It's all about metadata!

Does this count as a Virtual Copy?

4. Edit in Photoshop CS3 - Lightroom is great for basic editing and workflow, but when it comes to detailed retouching you can't beat Adobe Photoshop. Fortunately, Lightroom makes it easy to work an image in Photoshop and maintain it seamlessly alongside your original file in the Library. Just right-click on an image and select "Edit in Photoshop CS3": your image will be exported to a PSD file and automatically open in PSCS3.

Now that you're in PS, you can do any type of edits you need. Once you save the file and return to Lightroom, your PSD file will be in the Library right next to your original RAW file. This kind of automation and integration relieves the burden of figuring out how to manage your files when going back and forth between applications & allows you to focus on your images instead of file management. If you use this feature, pay attention to the first tip & disable sharpening! Also, you may be interested in my recent post on fixing this feature should LR say "CS3 not found".

5. Split Toning for Fun & Profit - The Lightroom split toning features are great! They are highly useful in both Black and White Toning as well as color images (such as the one to the right). Split Toning allows you to apply a color cast individually to the highlight and shadow portions of your image and can take a photograph from plain-Jane to Vogue.

I've recently enjoyed the look of a warm/cool split tone applied to a color image which has had its saturation turned way down and its vibrance cranked up. Given how accessible these controls are, I suspect that color split-tone looks will be overused and become passé... until then I'm lovin' it!






I hope you've enjoyed these Top 5 Lightroom Tips. Much thanks to Darren and his group writing project for the inspiration. If this is your first time visiting, I'd love for you to poke around this (relatively new) blog's archives and consider subscribing to the feed!