Having Lightroom Auto-Set Your White & Black Points
This tip is really mostly for folks coming from Photoshop to Lightroom, but even if you’ve never used Photoshop this can still come in handy for setting your white and black points automatically (this is something we used to do in Photoshop using Levels)Â and it’s especially helpful if you have a kind of flat-looking image. By setting the white and black points, it widens the tonal range of a flat-looking image (an image that has gaps at either end of the Histogram).
To have Lightroom set your White & Black points automatically for you:
(1) Hold the Shift key
(2) Double-click directly on the Whites and Blacks slider
That’s it — you’ll see one or both of the sliders move (depending on the image) automatically. If one doesn’t move, it just means that there was enough data there to where an adjustment wasn’t necessary.
Give it a try on your next image and see what you think. 🙂
Best,
-Scott
Great feature but why can’t it be applied across multiple images? Sit there and shift click blacks and whites per image. Automation Adobe common!
Is there a similar option on Lightroom Mobile?
For Lightroom 6 and Mac Os, it is Shift+ Alt and click on “White” or “Black”
This tip doesn’t seem to work for me with Lightroom CC and Windows 8.1. Is this perhaps an OS X tip? I’ve been searching for the Windows equivalent and coming up short. Anyone know?
I’m also in lightroom cc and on windows 8.1 and this tip doesnt work for me. Double clicking does reset but shift double click doesn’t set the white point or black point. Anyone got any ideas?
How to batch this? I do AUTO in library module, and then (as brett maxwell said) hold shift and click double click exposure, contrast, highlight and shadows in order to set them to 0 again
Interestingly, holding down the shift key and double clicking the Exposure, Contrast, Highlights and Shadows will auto set as well. Also doing this in reverse order may give different adjustments except for exposure and contrast are always adjust the same. This is a nice time saver and you can tweak afterwards to your liking.
Great tip,also a big thank you for bringing this site alive again.
Excellent tip ! Glad to see it, it’s a time-saver !
interesting note, if you do this in Library module (shift-double click “Blacks” label) it resets to zero rather than doing auto, same as if you Cmd/Ctrl double click.
Now that is a Killer Tip! Thanks a ton Scott. This is a big timesaver
[…] Man, does this save time. Â Thanks to Scott and for the article I learned this from click here […]
Great trick. Another small way to speed up our workflow. Thanks. It would be nice if Adobe would incorporate the ability to make this a preset in a future update.
is there a way of automating the automatic, and have this applied on import?
Hi Tim: I’m thinking probably not, because you can’t turn a shift-double-click into a preset. That being said, if anybody’s got an idea on how to turn it into a preset that you could apply on import, that would be pretty cool. 🙂
I have been asking Adobe to add this feature (auto clip black and white) on import since ’14. I have not seen a response. It would be a huge time-saver since this gets the .raw image to the best starting place for future adjustment.
It’s good to see fresh material on the site. Good work.
In LightRoom 3 and previous you could do this with a preset. You had to put the text in the preset file manually (“Blacks= Auto”, or something like that) but that was a critical part of my import preset that got all my images close to perfect. I wish they would bring back that feature, whether officially or with a minor text edit of the preset.
brett maxwell it still works just need to change your Process to 2010 and save the preset and edit it later. But its only for the black point. Need it for the white point also would be nice.
Even easier — hold shift & double-click on the slider name. Easier to hit, doesn’t do a micro-adjust first.
Great point, Fred. Thanks! 🙂