Lightroom Tips

It's Scott Kelby Guest Tip Week

Welcome to my Steal-a-tip-from-Scott-Kelby’s-New-Book tip week. Since I’m teaching a couple of 1-day Lightroom seminars on the west coast (LA and San Francisco) I figured it would be hard to keep up with the blog. Scott doesn’t know this yet, but to help celebrate the release of his brand new Lightroom 3 Book for Digital Photographers I’m stealing tips from his book all week long (or until Scott finds out) 🙂

Here’s the first one and it has to do with showing Before and Afters in the Develop module. By default, if you press the (Backslash) key in the Develop module, it toggles you back and forth between the original untouched image (the Before view) and the photo as it looks now with your edits. However, what if you donÂ’t want your Before photo to be the original? For example, letÂ’s say you did some Basic panel edits on a portrait, and then you used the Adjustment Brush to do some portrait retouching. Maybe youÂ’d like to see the Before photo showing the Basic panel edits after they were applied, but before you started retouching. To do that, go to the History panel (in the left side Panels area), and scroll down until you find the step right before you started using the Adjustment Brush. Right-click on that history state and choose Copy History Step Settings to Before. That now becomes your new Before photo when you press the key. I know—thatÂ’s totally cool.

Thanks to Scott for letting me steal his tips this week. If you’d like to check out his new book (and a freebie disc of all my LR presets that comes with it) you can find it right here.

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