My 12 Most-Used Lightroom Shortcuts

Happy Friday, everybody! These aren’t a list of hidden or super secret shortcuts — just those “meat and potatoes” type shortcuts that I use day in and day out. Here goes:

G – This instantly returns me to the Library Module and the Grid view of all my thumbnail images.

2. Shift-tab – This hides all the panels and lets me see my image really big on screen).

3. D — This takes my image quickly over to the Develop module for editing.

4. Command-E on Mac (Ctrl-E on Windows) – This takes my image over to Photoshop to do some editing over there.

5. F – This gives me a full-screen view of my image and Lightroom is hidden from view.

6. P / X / U – These are the letters I use when I cull through a shoot. P marks the shot as a “Pick” (a keeper). X marks the photo as a reject (I shot I not only want to remove from Lightroom but remove from my hard drive at the same time). U is what I hit if I made a mistake or changed my mind. It “undos” my P or X.

7. Command-N (Windows: Ctrl-N) – This creates a New Collection from my selected photos.

8. V – Tapping this key shows what my image would look like in Black and White, so I can see if it’s even worth going through a full black and white conversion. To switch it back to color, tap “V” again.

9. To Reset any slider double-click on the slider’s name. When you’re using the Adjustment Brush, to reset all the sliders to zero, double-click directly on the word “Effects.”

10. To change brush sizes, pressing the left bracket key [ makes the brush smaller in size, and the right bracket key ] makes it larger.

11. Press the Backslash key ( \ ) to see a before/after of your image.

12. Press Y to see a side-by-side before/after preview of your editing. Press Y again to return to your normal view.

Hope you found those helpful. If you have any interesting ones that you use every day, I’d love to hear about ’em. Leave me a comment below with your most-used ones that aren’t on my list above.

A New Series For Photographers From SmugMug, And It’s Sooooo Good!

SmugMug (the folks you use to host your portfolio and sell your prints) have done it again – they’ve created a new series for photographers (created by brilliant filmmaker Anton Lorimer) called “This Lens Tells Stories” and it’s about how photographers can change the way we see the world & each other. Check out this one-minute trailer below: 

You can see more at https://bit.ly/3Ox1hvK – this is such good stuff!

Have a great weekend, everybody! 🙂

-Scott

P.S. If you’re not watching “The Old Man” (starring Jeff Bridges) on FX, you gotta give it a watch. Really good! (heads up: it’s a bit violent. OK, it’s more than a bit, but still…so good).