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Developing Efficiencies In Lightroom’s Develop Module

This Article Features Photo Zoom

Yesterday morning I had coffee with a former student who took my Lightroom in a one-day seminar earlier this year. I commented that I felt Lightroom was such an intuitive program that it's pretty easy to learn by taking a one-day class and supplementing it with a good book (my favorite is Martin Evening’s The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.) My student wasn’t sure, saying that he thought the program had enough nuances that a few days of classroom instruction wouldn’t be overkill. As I look at some of my previous "In the Zone" posts, I’m realizing he might be on to something. While I still feel it’s relatively easy to install Lightroom and start using it right away, there are numerous features like exporting catalogs, using plug-ins and fine-tuning printing options that do require a bit of study to master and which can turn into huge time-saving tasks.

One part of Lightroom that all photographers should master is the Develop module. While most shooters love the ability to easily make tone and color corrections to their images in this module, the ability to create Develop presets and to apply changes to many images at once make "developing" in Lightroom one of the biggest time-savers that digital photographers have in their arsenals. And in my opinion, the less time I spend on the computer, the better.

There are basically three ways to apply Develop settings to multiple images: the Previous/Synch button, presets and Camera Raw defaults. I’ll describe each feature in detail in this post.

The first option lets you synchronize settings between one image and one or more others, and is very straightforward. It works like this. First, make your Develop changes to an image. If you have a second image that can use the same settings, highlight that second image, then click on the Previous button (located at the bottom of the Develop panel on the right). This basically pastes the Develop settings from your most recently edited image to the highlighted image. (You can do the same thing by using the Copy and Paste buttons on the bottom left of the screen.)

The Previous button works great if you need to just apply all the changes from the previous image to one additional image. If however, you want to apply these changes to several images or apply only a subset of the Develop changes, you’ll want to use the Synch option. To do this, highlight the "master" image that has the Develop settings you like, then select the additional images that need these settings (using Shift-click or Ctrl-click to make your image selections). As you can see in the screen shot, one of these selected images is "more selected" than the others, which is denoted by having a brighter "slide mount" outline. This is your master image, with the Develop settings you're copying. Once you've selected multiple images, the Previous button changes to the Sync button. Click on that button to bring up the pop-up window seen in the screenshot. Now you can choose to synchronize all of the Develop settings from your master image or just a subset of those settings. This is a great way to quickly make white balance, tone and other changes to a series of images from one photo shoot.

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