Julieanne Kost's Blog

Often I have found that I want to apply perspective correction to multiple files at once using the Upright feature in Lightroom 5. 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 Lightroom’s Develop module, when you choose Settings > Copy Settings or use the shortcut Command + Shift + C (Mac) | Control  + Shift + C (Win), Lightroom copies the setting that you select (in the subsequent Copy Settings dialog), to the clipboard and holds on to them. Therefore, as you move through your photo shoot, you can easily paste those setting to any additional image(s). This might be a great way, for example,  to paste a subset of attributes such as a vignette or color toning to images while moving through a shoot, and still be able to use Sync (or Auto Sync) to apply other modifications.

After making changes to an image in the Develop Module, selecting another image and clicking “Previous” applies ALL of the changes made to  the previous image to the current image, whereas clicking “Sync’”allows you to choose which of the changes that were made to the first image should be applied to  the current image.

Clicking on “Copy…” displays the Copy Settings dialog where you can select which attributes to copy. Clicking Paste will paste only those attributes that were copied.

Selecting multiple images and selecting Auto Sync will apply all changes (from that point forward) to all selected files.