Julieanne Kost's Blog

The other day a customer asked me if there was a way to quickly find all of the virtual copies in their Lightroom library that didn’t have any adjustments applied in the Develop module so that they could delete them. (Unfortunately, someone had told them that they had to make virtual copies to all of their files before they made any changes and they now had hundreds of virtual copies that had never been adjusted/useless.)

I thought that it might be helpful to share the solution:

• Create a new Smart Collection in the Library module.

• Set the Criteria to the following:

–Copy name “isn’t empty” (to find all the virtual copies)

–Develop > Has Adjustments = “false”.

These 2 criteria will find all the Virtual Copies that do not have a Develop Adjustment.

Then, do one of two things. Either:

1) Select all of the Virtual Copies that you want to permanently delete and choose cmd+shift+option+return (mac) or ctrl+shift+alt+backspace (Windows). Note: this removes the Virtual Copies from the collection as well as deletes them from the library)

or:

2) Select all of the images in the Smart Collection.

• Use some type of “tag” such as the Reject Flag, a Star Rating, or a color label to somehow identify these virtual copies (something that you haven’t used to identify other images).

• Exit out of the Smart Collection by selecting “All Photographs” from the Catalog panel (or select a smaller subset by using the Folder Panel).

• Back in the grid view, filter for the virtual copies using the Library Filter bar at the top of the Grid view:

–Under Attributes, check the Virtual Copies icon.

–Then, add the attribute set in step 4 (flag or color etc.).

Note: I noticed that in the Lightroom 5 Beta, the Lens Correction attribute is not considered an adjustment…

Thanks Eric!

In order to visualize how an image might be cropped when a specific aspect ratio (or several aspect ratios) are needed, in the Develop Module select the Crop Tool (R). Then, choose Tools > Crop Guide Overlay  > Choose Aspect Ratios.  Check to enable as many aspect ratio overlays as desired.

Some additional shortcuts/features:

• Tapping the “O” key will cycle through Overlays.

•Shift + O cycles the Overlay orientation.

•To define which Overlays to cycle through, choose Tools > Crop Guide Overlay > Choose  Overlays to Cycle.

•To only display the overlay on mouse-down, choose Tools > Tool Overlay > Auto Show.

If you make changes in the Develop module in the Lightroom 5 Beta and then choose to edit that image in Photoshop you will want Lightroom to render the PSD/TIFF file, not Photoshop (otherwise the Develop module changes will not be applied because Photoshop CS6’s version of Camera Raw is older than Lightroom’s).

In order to make sure that you have the option to choose between Lightroom and Photoshop, choose Preferences > General and click the “Reset all warnings dialogs” button. Note: if this button isn’t available – then the warning dialogs are all at their default settings). Then, choose Photo > Edit In > Edit in Photoshop. A warning should appear: “This version of Lightroom may require the Photoshop Camera Raw plug-in version 8.1 for full compatibility”. Since Lightroom 5 is in Beta, this version of Adobe Camera Raw is not available for Photoshop CS6, so choose the “Render using Lightroom” option. Now Lightroom 5 Beta will render the file and hand it off to Photoshop with all of the changes you have made.

In the Develop module with Soft Proofing enabled,  the before/after view now displays the Current photo (on the left) and the proofed photo (on the right).

Note: you can still display the Before state on the left (as opposed to the Current photo) by selecting it from the Before drop down menu in the tool bar (under the preview area).

There have been times when I have decided that the settings that I had applied to the Virtual Copy are better than what are on my Master. In this case, I can quickly apply the settings from a virtual copy to the master, by selecting  Photo > Set Copy as Master (in the Library module).

Although it’s easy to find your Virtual Copies by using the Filter options in Lightroom, (use the Attribute filter and click the Virtual Copy icon on the far right),

it isn’t as readily apparent how one can create a Smart Collection that automatically finds your Virtual Copies – but it can be done! In the Lightroom 5 Beta, choose Library > New Smart Collection and under the Match category, choose  File Name / Type > Copy Name. Then, set the pull down menu to “isn’t empty”.

In previous versions of Lightroom, you could Control (Mac) / Right Mouse (Win) -click a collection and choose “Set as Target Collection”. Then, adding additional images to the collection was as simple as tapping the “B” key (as opposed to dragging each image from the grid view into the collection). In the Lightroom 5 Beta, the “Set as Target Collection” option has been added to the Create Collection dialog (as a check box) so that tapping the “B” key will automatically add the selected image(s) to the targeted collection.

The Lightroom team has added new criteria (filters) for Smart Collections including:

• Size (in megapixels). Note: the sub-options include Long Edge, Short Edge, Width, Height, Megapixels, Long Edge Uncropped, Short Edge Uncropped, Width Uncropped, Height Uncropped, Megapixels Uncropped, and Aspect Ratio

•Bit Depth

•Number of color channels

•Color Mode

•Color Profile

•Smart Preview status

•PNG

Note: the last two options, Smart Preview Status and PNG are also available as Filters.

In addition, Lightroom now remembers your last viewed image in a Collection so when navigating from one collection to another, you’ll be restored to that image upon returning to the Collection.

To view the LAB color values of an image (instead of the RGB values), in Develop Module, Control -click (Mac) | Right Mouse -click (Win) on the Histogram  and choose Show Lab Color Values. Then, position your cursor over the image preview and the values will be displayed as a LAB color readout.

Here are three more interesting Upright options/features:

1) When you apply an Upright mode to a file to correct perspective, Lightroom caches that information (there are a number of reasons for this including but not limited to speed, consistency, future versioning, etc.). This means that if you apply an Upright mode and then decide to check “Enable Profile Correction” (simply because you forgot to do this first), you will want to click the “Reanalyze” option. This will tell upright to forget about those stored corrections, redo its analysis of the image, and compute a new correction.

2) Upright will generally work better on raw files compared to non-raw files, because it can take advantage of more reliable metadata (e.g., focal length).

3) Rotated crops and manual perspective corrections on existing images will usually interfere with automated Upright corrections. For this reason, applying any of the Upright corrections will reset the crop and manual perspective adjustments (Horizontal, Vertical, Rotate, Scale, and Aspect controls). Resetting the crop has the benefit of showing the user the maximum amount of image area remaining after an Upright adjustment (of course the crop can then be re-adjusted). Resetting the manual options will yield a better correction. However, in case you have a workflow that requires maintaining manual perspective corrections, Option + (Mac) | Alt  + (Win) when choosing an Upright mode will preserve those manual settings.

In this Quick Tip (How to Remove Unwanted Collections when Exporting Catalogs in Lightroom), Julieanne demonstrates how to quickly clean up an exported catalog of any extraneous collections.

Just as an FYI – I had a great talk with the engineer who works on the Import/Export as Catalogs (after I recorded this video), and he provided an excellent synopsis on why those extra collections are there. As it so often turns out, the topic is much more complicated than my little brain imagined:

The idea is that for every single photo that is included in the export, all information related to that photo is included. Let’s take for example that you have a collection of “Tree”. One piece of information that is related to some of these photos is “I’m in the Tahoe collection” so the Tahoe collection appears in the collection panel, containing those photos.  The Tahoe collection doesn’t contain all of the photos it contained in the original catalog of course, but only the photos that were part of the source (Trees) that was selected for export.

Perhaps this behavior seems odd.  We could change the behavior, but it’s a dangerous, slippery slope.  For example, what if the source you selected for export wasn’t “Trees” or “Tahoe” but instead was a folder that contained photos, some of which appear in both Trees and Tahoe?  Should neither of the collections appear in the exported catalog?  I think if we start dropping information from catalog exports, we’ll quickly hit scenarios where we’re dropping things that customers don’t actually want us to drop.

Hence, you now have a simple work around to quickly remove the collections that you don’t need, while still making sure that you still have the option to see all of the information related to those photos when you do choose to export a catalog. : )

Often I have found that I want to apply perspective correction to multiple files at once using the Upright feature in Lightroom 5 Beta. But depending on the results I want to achieve, it’s best to know that there are two different ways of accomplishing this.

In the first situation, you might have a series of unrelated images that all need to have their own set of perspective corrections made to them. In this case, the easiest way to apply Upright would be to:

• Select all of the desired files in the Develop Module.

• Enable the Auto Sync feature (by toggling the switch to the left of the Sync… button).

•In the Lens Correction Basic panel, click the desired Upright mode (Auto, Level, Vertical, or Full) in order to apply the perspective correction to all selected files

With this method, each image is analyzed individually and the perspective corrected.

If you prefer not to use Auto Sync, you can select the first file and apply the desired Upright mode. Then, use the shortcut Command + C (Mac) | Control + C (Win) and check Upright Mode. Note: if the Upright Mode option is grayed out, that’s because the Upright transformations option is checked. Uncheck Upright Transformation and check Upright Mode instead. Then, select the other files to which you want the perspective correction applied and press Command + V (Mac) | Control + V (Win) to paste the corrections.

Or, if this is something you do all of the time, you can create a preset by selecting Develop > New Preset and enabling the “Upright Mode” option. 

In the second situation, you might have a series of related images – such as a sequence of bracketed exposures or a set of time lapse images for which you need the same exact numeric perspective corrections made to each image. In this scenario, you don’t want to run the upright analysis on each individual image because, due to robustness issues, Upright is very likely to return a slightly different result on each of the images in the selection. Instead, what you really want to do is have the upright analysis be performed on one of the images, and then have the result of that analysis (the numeric transformation) copied and applied  to the other images in the set. In order to do this,  copy the settings with Command + C (Mac) | Control + C (Win) and in the Copy Setting dialog, choose “Upright Transforms”. Then, select the other files that you want the perspective correction applied to and choose Command + V (Mac) | Control + V (Win) to paste the corrections.

You could choose to create a preset by selecting Develop > New Preset and selecting the “Upright Transforms” option but I’m not sure that this preset would be as useful (when applied to additional images in the future)  because the numeric values are locked into it.

In past versions of Lightroom, it was not possible to make edits in the Develop module (nor the Quick Develop panel) to files that were off-line. In the Lightroom 5 beta, it is now possible to make these types of edits by creating Smart Previews for the images. Smart Previews are a new type of “preview” (not to be confused with the previews generated to view images in the Library module). They are significantly smaller than the original raw files and are stored in the same folder as your catalog (Smart Preview.lrdata”).

In order to create Smart Previews, the original files must be on-line. Therefore, you will want to make the Smart Previews before taking the images off-line. There are several ways to create Smart Previews in Lightroom:

• On Import – in the File Handling panel, check the option to “Build Smart Previews”.

• In the Library module – selecting your photos (or folders of photos) and select Library > Previews > Build Smart Previews (use this method to create Smart Previews for images that have already been imported into Lightroom).

• In Preferences – choose Preferences > General > Build Smart Previews on Import.

• When exporting as a Catalog – select File > Export as Catalog and check the option to “Build Smart Previews”.

If you have created Smart Previews for files, in the Develop module, the Histogram will notify you as to what you are working with:

• “Original” if there is not a smart preview built for the file and the original is on-line.

• “Original + Smart Preview” if there is a Smart Preview and the original is online.

• “Smart Preview” if there is a Smart Preview and the original is off-line.

When you make changes to a file that is off-line and has a Smart Preview, when the originals become available (are on-line), any changes there were made to the Smart Preview are automatically applied to the original. There is no action that you need to do – Lightroom will automatically apply all changes made to the Smart Preview to the original file. Basically, the rule is that if there is an original, then Lightroom will use the original, if the originals are not on-line, then Lightroom will use the Smart Preview. And of course if the original file is online, both the original and the Smart Preview are both updated as changes are made.

Keep in mind that these smart previews are smaller version of the original files (there are several reasons for this, the most obvious is to reduce the amount of space they take on the hard drive). With that said, since they are only 2540 pixels on the long edge, when applying Sharpening and Noise Reduction settings in the Details panel, the Smart Preview view at 100% will be a different magnification than the original. Therefore, for the most accuracy, you might need to confirm the setting when the files are on-line and you are able to view the original at 100%.

Finally, not only can use Smart Previews to Develop images when they’re off-line, you are also able to use them in the Publish Services panel (in case, for example, you want to publish your off-line files to Facebook or Flickr) and Export them as JPEG. You can even use them to layout a book (although you will not be able to print the book until the original images are on-line as the quality of the Smart Previews will not be high enough to print), and create and output a video slideshow (although again, they can not be used to output a slideshow to PDF because of quality concerns) and create and export web galleries. The best rule of thumb; for the highest quality, you’ll most likely want your original files when outputting files.

Tapping the “F” key in the Lightroom 5 beta will go to a “true” full screen mode where the image is displayed full screen and the panels, filmstrip, modular picker and tool bar are all hidden – all with one keystroke. If you prefer the legacy behavior, use Shift + F.

Command + Option (Mac) | Control + Alt (Win)-drag will duplicate local adjustments made with the Radial Filter, Gradient Filter and the Adjustment brush. Note: since local adjustment pins made with the Adjustment Brush cannot be moved, the dragging gesture is treated the same as clicking, which means both gestures (dragging or clicking) will duplicate the selected correction in place.