In this video tutorial (Why Does the Photograph’s Preview Change in Lightroom and Bridge? ), Julieanne explains one of the great mysteries of Lightroom and Bridge – why Lightroom (or Bridge) displays a photograph one way and then changes the way it looks a moment later. It will all become clear with just a little information about how digital camera files are captured and displayed by different applications.
Here are a number of shortcuts to help navigate the before and after views in Lightroom’s Develop module:
• “\” toggles Before and After view full screen (one view showing at a time).
• “Y” displays Before and After (Left/Right) View. Add the Option (Mac) / Alt (Win) to toggle Before and After Top/Bottom view.
• Shift + Y toggles to Split Screen view.
• Drag and drop the name of any state from the History panel on top of the image in the “Before” preview area to compare with the current state (this can be infinitely more useful then comparing the original “Import” state!)
• Control (Mac), right mouse (Win) -click on a Snapshot to “Copy Snapshot Settings to Before” preview in Before/After view.
• Command + Option (Mac) / Control + Alt (Win) + Shift + Left/Right arrows move the After state to Before/Before state to After.
• Command + Option (Mac) / Control + Alt (Win) + Shift + Left arrow moves the After state to Before.
• Command + Option (Mac) / Control + Alt (Win) + Shift + Right arrow moves the Before state to After.
• Command + Option (Mac) / Control + Alt (Win) + Shift + Up arrow swap the Before and After state.
And, if you only want to preview the effects of a certain panel, click the toggle switch at the top of the panel to temporarily hide the panel’s effects (except the Basic panel – it does not have this switch).
Whew.
“P” toggles the Preview on/off (to quickly compare before and after). However, it only toggles on and off the preview for the active panel (Basic, Tone Curve etc). In order to toggle all changes made in all panels, select the Presets or Snapshot’s panel and tap “P”.
“V” toggles Hide/Show Adjustment Brush pins and/or the tool Overlay for Graduated Filter, Spot Removal and Red Eye Removal tools.
When working with the Adjustments panel, holding the backslash key, displays a temporary preview of the unadjusted state of a document. (It’s like unchecking the Preview check box temporarily – so you have to have made a change to the adjustment for this to work.) Because of the need to distinguish a tap from a hold, there’s a slight delay before the results of the hold behavior become visible.
