What To Do if Lightroom Starts Messing Up

For those of you with a Photoshop background, you know that if Photoshop starts acting weird (anything from tools missing from the toolbar to things just not working like they should), resetting Photoshop’s preference file usually fixes the problem (well, about 98% of the time, which is pretty high).

So, is there a way to do something similar in Lightroom if it’s acting weird?  There is in Lightroom CC (Well, you could always dig up the preferences, but it was definitely a hunt finding out exactly where it is on your computer, which is probably why Adobe made it so much easier in Lightroom CC — now it’s more like Photoshop where you hold a key combination at startup and it asks if you want to replace the preferences.

That keyboard combination for Lightroom is:

Shift-Option-Command (on Mac)
Shift-Alt-Ctrl (on Windows)

Just hold that while launching Lightroom and the dialog you see below will appear asking if you want to reset the preferences or just start normally.

Of course, hit “reset” and that should do the trick. By the way — sometimes just quitting and restarting Lightroom alone will work if things start acting wonky.

In other news…
We are just eight days away from my Worldwide Photo Walk. I hope you’re signed up to join us. If you’re not, here’s the link to see if there’s a walk near you.

Have a great weekend everybody, and we’ll see ya back here on Monday!

Best,

-Scott