4 Lightroom Classic Tips for Experienced Users

Monday 7 June 2021, 23:46 by Elja Trum | 6,418 views | 3 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Sometimes you have known something for years, yet there are still useful features you have never used. When you watch someone else, you sometimes discover features you did not know existed. In this article, 4 useful tips for working with Lightroom Classic.

1. Fine adjustments to sliders

If there is one thing you do a lot in Lightroom, it is dragging the sliders. Sometimes it can be difficult to make a fine adjustment with your mouse or tablet. Fortunately, there is a handy trick for this.

While hovering your mouse over a slider, press the up or down arrow on your keyboard. This makes a tiny adjustment. The exact value naturally depends on the slider's value. For exposure, for example, it is 0.1 EV.


Would you rather make larger changes? Use the Shift key together with the arrow keys. The step for exposure is then 0.33 EV.

2. Quickly reset the Adjustment Brush

I regularly use an Adjustment Brush to quickly make an adjustment to part of an image. Lightroom remembers the settings from the last time you used the Adjustment Brush each time you start a new brush.

That is often useful, but quite regularly you simply want to set everything back to zero so you can start a new adjustment with a clean slate.

Simply double-click the word 'Effect:' at the top of the panel. This resets all the Adjustment Brush settings. It saves you a lot of unnecessary dragging.

3. Use keyboard shortcuts

Lightroom works much faster when you use keyboard shortcuts. There are a huge number of them, and you obviously cannot learn them all by heart. So look up the shortcuts for actions you perform often.


I also have a handy cheat sheet for you to get started quickly with keyboard shortcuts. It still says Lightroom 5, but the shortcuts have not changed and still work in the current version.

» Download: Lightroom Classic keyboard shortcuts

4. Quickly enable automatic masking

When you are working with the Adjustment Brush, you often want to switch quickly between 'Auto Mask' and regular masking. This just involves changing a tick box, so it seems simple enough.

The only thing is that you first have to return to the relevant panel. A quicker way is simply to hold down CTRL or Command. This automatically switches your Adjustment Brush to 'Auto Mask' mode.

What is your Lightroom tip?

There are of course many more useful features hidden in Lightroom. Share your favourite tip in the comments!

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