Julieanne Kost's Blog

In this video tutorial (Smart Previews in Lightroom 5), you’ll learn how to create lightweight, efficient Smart Previews to work with offline images in Lightroom – including the Develop module!

In this video tutorial (The New Radial Filter in Lightroom 5), you’ll learn how easy it is to apply Lightroom’s selective adjustments including color and tonal corrections using the new Radial Filter tool.

Keywords – Lightroom 5, The Develop Module, Radial Filter, Mask, Selective corrections,

In this tutorial (Advanced Healing Brush and Visualization Tool in Lightroom 5), you’ll discover the new enhancements to Lightroom’s Advanced Healing Brush including the ability to heal and clone non-circular brush spots as well as remove easy-to-miss sensor dust using the new Visualization tool.

In this video tutorial (Correcting Perspective using Upright in Lightroom 5), Julieanne demonstrates how to automatically fix common problems such as tilted horizons as well as converging verticals in buildings using Lightroom’s Upright controls for perspective correction.

Lightroom 5 is now available!

Check out these new videos  (What’s New in Lightroom 5), to learn the new features and enhancements in the latest release of Lightroom 5.

And if you’re new to Lightroom, check out my Lightroom 5 Getting Started series where you will quickly learn the features and tools in each module, to make your workflow more efficient and increase your productivity.

The double and single arrow buttons in Quick Develop (in the Library module) make the following changes:

• Exposure 1/3 stop, 1 stop

• All others (Contrast, Highlights Shadows etc.) 20 and  5.

• The Temperature and Tint sliders are dependent on the file format. When working with JPEG files, you guessed it, the changes are in increments of 20 and 5. For raw images, the increments for Temperature and tint are also 20 and 5. However in this case they are being calculated in relative percentage terms. (Camera raw translates the relative percentage amount to the absolute temperature and tint value using curve functions – both are quadratic and perhaps not as obvious!)

• Finally, holding the Option + (Mac) | Alt  + (Win) in the Library module will change the Clarity and Vibrance settings to Sharpening and Saturation in the Quick Develop panel.

When you choose one of the Upright modes in the Lens Correction panel in Lightroom 5, the results are cached so that the adjustment is completely stable.  That means that if you make a change such as enabling/disabling the Profile Corrections and/or Remove Chromatic Aberration options, you will need to click the Reanalyze button if you want Lightroom to forget about those stored (cached) Upright corrections and redo its analysis of the image and compute a new correction. This feature, the ability to Reanalyze (or force an update to the Upright mode) is “as-designed”, and for good reason: in the future, if Lightroom makes changes to the Upright feature, your legacy files will open exactly as they did before.

In addition, by default, Upright will reset any crops or manual transform settings currently applied to an image. This is because rotated crops and manual perspective corrections on existing images will usually interfere with Upright. For this reason, selecting one of the Upright modes will reset the crop and manual perspective adjustments in the Lens Correction Panel (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. To preserver these settings, Option + (Mac) | Alt  + (Win) -click when choosing an Upright correction mode.

(Thanks to Eric Chan for these insights!)

Command + Shift + = (Mac) | Control  + Shift + = (Win) toggles Lightroom’s Lock Zoom Position feature enabling Lightroom to remember the zoom position of each image when switching between them.

• In Lightroom 5, it’s much easier to add text in the Book Module. Each page now has Transparent Buttons for “Page Text” and, if a photo exists on the page, “Photo Text”.  Note: These are linked to the existing Page Text and Photo Text controls in the Text panel.

• When positioning your cursor over a page in the page picker, it displays a circle (just like the quick collection icon). Clicking the circle adds that page to the Favorites list.

• You can now print using Blurb’s “Standard” paper stock, which is a more economical yet lighter weight paper.

• All the same metadata that is available for captions in other modules is now available for captions in the Book module.

After modifying a page template (for example, by changing the cell padding), Control -click (Mac) | Right Mouse -click (Win)  in the page to and choose Save as Custom Page.

These custom page layouts become available under the “Custom Page” category in the Page Picker (in the Page panel).

Note: Custom pages are specific to Book settings (size, dimensions) and file format (Blurb book, JPEG, PDF).

• Check the Page Numbers option in the Book module in Lightroom 5 to add page numbers to your book. Then, use the pull down menu to position them (Top Corner, Bottom Corner, Top, Side, Bottom).

• To change the start page for numbering, Control -click (Mac) | Right Mouse -click (Win) in a page and choose Start Page Number. Note: Lightroom defaults to starting the page numbering on the first non-cover page.

• Control -click (Mac) | Right Mouse -click (Win) in a page to change the appearance of Page number either globally or locally.

• Control -click (Mac) | Right Mouse -click (Win) in a page to hide a page number on a specific page.

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, Lightroom 5 displays the before/after view for 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).