Cool Little Lightroom Tip For Seeing The Before/After You Want (instead of the default)
Hi Everybody — Here’s today’s tip, and I’m going to use it in a way I use it, but you can apply this to all sorts of situations. OK, let me lay out the situation (below):
Above: I opened a color image and I converted it to a Black and White. Then I tweaked the image to make it more contrasty, and I adjusted all sorts of little stuff (you can see a list of what I did over in the History panel. It keeps track of each step you did, and the settings).
Above: If I hit the “y” key on my keyboard to see a split-screen before/after (as seen here), the “before” it takes me all the way back to the original color image. But what I want to see is how the image looked when I converted it to black and white — before I did all the tweaks to the black and white image. So, I want a before/after of the black and white. That’s where this tip comes in.
Above: You can actually choose any one of the those steps listed in the History panel as your “before” image by right-cllicking on that History State (as I have here) and from the pop-up menu that appears choose “Copy History Step Settings to Before” (as shown here where I right-clicked on the Convert to Black and White state).
Above: As soon as you choose that, your “Before” changes to the state you right-clicked on and choose “Copy History Step Settings to Before” (as seen here), so now you can do a before/after of your black and white conversion, as seen above.
Hope you found that helpful!
-Scott
Good one, Scott!
Great tip, these little things that make the digital dark room so much friendliier.
Thanks Scott! Another super-helpful tip!!
Great tip Scott, Thanks.
Thanks Scott. This is very helpful.
Agree with everyone here, Thank you Scott for all your time and commitment to the community.
Very cool tip!
You can also just drag and drop the version you want from the history palette to the before section.
Lightroom is full of hidden gems, a lot of which I learned of here. Thanks Scott!
Thanks for this awesome tip! I can use this one “like a boss”!!
Thanks. I did find it helpful. I developed a wayyyy awkward procedure. Now you’ve shown me a better way.
Best tip ever! I’ve been looking/hoping for this for years. Thank you!!
Creating snapshots is handy, too. With snapshots, you can have more than one “before”.