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Lightroom makes extensive use of panels in order to simplify workflow. Often we’re in and out of panels all the time without making the best use of them. So here’s some tips on improving your panel usage.

Command(Mac)/Control click(PC) on any panel to collapse all the individual panels. Especially useful if all the panels are open and the one you want is at the bottom.

Option (Mac)/ Alt (PC) click on a panel header to activate ‘Solo Mode’. In Solo Mode, only one panel at a time is open. Repeating the Alt/Option click will deactivate Solo Mode.

Around this time last year, Thomas Hawk detailed his then current workflow, which entailed use of Bridge and Camera Raw. This year, he has migrated to Lightroom and has a new workflow post to detail the change.

“Last year I wrote a blog post detailing my photography workflow. Since last year though my workflow has changed a bit as I’ve migrated from Adobe’s Bridge software to Adobe’s Lightroom software and thought that I’d post an updated article detailing how I process my images from start to finish. Questions about my workflow are some of the most common questions I’m regularly asked.” Read More

Click to view movie

The humble Blacks slider plays an important role in allowing you to optimize the contrast of your photos as you process them in the Develop module. This movie clip is all about how much to safely clip the blacks when working with different types of images as well as how the black clipping point you set in Lightroom relates to the black clipping point of the print output process. The answer to the question ‘how black should I make my blacks’ may be easier than you think.

Note that in the final section where I compare different output profile conversions, the Black Point Compensation box must be kept checked (which is the default setting). You would also want to make sure this box is checked when making a print via the Photoshop Print dialog. And in the case of Lightroom printing, this is always enabled anyway.

Please note this video is in Quicktime format. A player can be downloaded from apple.com.

Many moons ago, an Adobe knowledge base article that solved an issue for older video cards, introduced the concept of the config.lua file. The config.lua file is file Lightroom will look for on startup and apply settings from within to change behaviour within Lightroom. There is no list of commands for what you can put in there available to the public, but occasionally a Lightroom Team member will suggest something that might help with a problem, or that can help debug a problem.

Joe Barrett of The Image-space has just uploaded a new Lightroom 2 ebook on his website.
You reviewed my last book back in March last year. Thanks.

It’ a collection of over 25 tips and techniques that he’s been progressively posting. It’s not the first time you’ve seen the name either, because he also had one for Lightroom 1. As with the first book, this is free, but donations are accepted.
Tips include:

It seems that nVidia users seem to draw the short straw with Lightroom. When Version 1 was released, it took a while to find out that certain performance issues were due to the use of nView. Now with Version 2 it seems there are different performance issues with nVidia.

However Flickr user MarkW Photo has found settings that greatly aid in the speed of the brush tool for Lightroom 2 nVidia users.

“I have finally fixed my slow performance issues with LR2! Today I did a bit of playing around with different performance settings. I’m using LR2 on a HP Pavillion 6258se Laptop. It has an 80GB Hard Drive, 2GB of Ram and the processor is a 1.8 GHz AMD Turion ™ 64 X2 Dual-Core. I had Windows Vista installed months ago but I downgraded back to XP due to Vista issues. First I opened the windows task manager so I could monitor the performance of Windows while using LR2. I noticed when using the develop tasks the performance stayed around 50%. When I used the retouch brush tools the performance still stayed around 50% but the brush tools were still slow. The more I brushed on the image the slower the brush refresh became. This told me that there must be a video performance issue and not necessarily a processor problem.

Just as you can use the Lens Correction sliders to remove a vignette, you can use them to apply a vignette too. I often like to deliberately darken or lighten the edges of a photograph and use the Lens Correction sliders as basic dodge or burn tools for the corners of a photograph. Here are some suggestions as to how you can extend the vignetting options when working with Lightroom 2

A recent ISO accident led to the creation of this little video tutorial on noise reduction in Lightroom. While it doesn’t offer as much control as dedicated software like Neat Image or Noiseware, it’s still quite usable. The one great thing about it, is that once you’re happy with the results on one image, you can batch it to the rest of the shoot, far quicker than with the dedicated packages. Click here to watch the MP4 video.

I have spoken about ideas for easier backup in the past, but I’m just going to give some detail on the automatic backup feature within Lightroom. To set up Backup in Lightroom, we need to open the Catalog Settings. This is located in the File Menu and can be accessed by using the shortcut Command-Option-, (Ctrl-Alt-, On PC).

Although Lightroom is advertised as being a member of the ‘Photoshop family’, Lightroom and Photoshop do at times feel more like distant cousins rather than close relatives. People are often puzzled about the relationship between Lightroom and Adobe Bridge and why it is you can browse images easily via Bridge, but in the case of Lightroom, you have to import everything first.

The following tips do assume that you already own Phtoshop CS2 or later, and therefore have access to Adobe Bridge which is the browser component of the Creative Suite (Adobe Bridge comes with Photoshop whether you buy the entire Suite package or just the standalone program). So let me show you how you a few ways you can improve the workflow between working in Bridge and working in Lightroom.