Improve your photo workflow!

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Keyboard shortcuts are great ways to improve your efficiency when working on post production.  Here’s a couple that I use in Lightroom to help improve things so I can get my processing done, and get out and back to shooting that much quicker!

CMD/CONTROL+8

This takes me all the way down the Develop Module to Camera Calibration.  If I ever want to make adjustments to which profile to use (typically I use Camera Standard, but it’s always fun to experiment), this gets me there a lot quicker than scrolling with my mouse or tablet!

R

Yup, that’s it – just the letter R.  From the Library Module, this will take you to the Develop Module, turn on the crop tool and show you how you currently have your image cropped for composition.  That’s it – one letter, no fuss no muss!

Module Switching

A super slick way to move between modules is to use your Command key (CTRL Key on Windows) and the ALT key along with the number for each module.  It’s super easy to remember too:

Library = CMD/CTRL+ALT+1

Develop = CMD/CTRL+ALT+2

Slideshow = CMD/CTRL+ALT+3

Print = CMD/CTRL+ALT+4

Web = CMD/CTRL+ALT+5

That’s it – 3 easy ways to improve your work flow with Lightroom shortcuts!  Wawnt some more?  Check out the full detailed reference guide straight from Adobe here.  What ways have you found to improve your own work flow?  There’s tons out there, so share your own in the comments!  Thanks for stopping in and we’ll see you here again next time!

Friday Fab Five

For something new here on the blog, I thought it might be fun to share some of my favorite keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop.  The idea here is that people will share their top five in the comments area and we can get an idea of many more keyboard shortcuts than we ever could have found out on our own (unless of course you are some Photoshop guru like The Photoshop Guys and the trainers/instructors of the world that do this for a living and already know all the shortcuts.)

So, anyway, here’s my Friday Fab Five Photoshop shortcuts and what they do:

  1. CMD/CTRL+J = duplicates your existing layer
  2. CRTL+ALT+SHIFT+E = Stamp Visible  This takes all your visible layers and merges them onto a new layer.  Increases file size, but very cool
  3. CMD/CTRL+’ = (yes, that’s apostrophe) – it activates the grid in your preferences.  Since my grid is set to every 33.33% and one subdivision, it basically shows a Rule of Thirds grid overlay on my images – very handy for compositional cropping
  4. Left and right brackets – decrease and increase your active brush, whether it’s for clone stamp, healing brush, eraser, history brush – whatever
  5. Alt+Eyedropper = you can drag the eyedropper outside of Photoshop to sample a color in another application (great for color matching)

So, those are my five for this friday – what are yours?  Sound off in the comments!  In the meantime, have a great weekend and happy shooting! I’ll leave you with my favorite What the Duck cartoon of the week:

wtd732

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