4 Essential Tips to Speed Up Your Lightroom Workflow
Saving time by speeding up workflow is a must for busy photographers, which is why we often write about it. Why waste time in post-processing when time is money?
We've learned a lot as photographers and preset designers through the years, including where to save time. While it's critical not to sacrifice the quality of our work, we have found ways to slim down our workflow. You can as well using our tips, starting with these three goals:
Maximize the full potential of editing software (Lightroom is what we use.)
Use shortcuts wherever and whenever possible (part of the first tip).
Your goal is to improve productivity while adding to your workflow.
With these three goals, let's look at our tips to improve your workflow
Autostacking
If you've ever used your auto-HDR mode, you know it captures three images in quick succession: a correctly exposed image, an underexposed one, and an overexposed one.
That's great, but if you then import these images each time you use this mode, you're importing a ton of photos. This means a lot of duplicate photos to sort through later in Lightroom. Here's a better option for sorting them:
Select all of the images in the library panel.
Right-click on any of them.
Scroll down to stacking.
Then auto stacking by capture time.
A new window will pop up.
Select the time frame between each stack. (Four or five seconds is usually good to group each HDR image together.)
Press Control-H (Command-H) to auto-generate an HDR image of each of those stacks.
And you're done!
Leveling Horizon
It's incredibly annoying to open up a batch of images to find that you've gotten the horizon crooked. You could go photo by photo to level them, but how much time would that take?
A lot! Here's a trick for leveling a batch, which will save you time. In the transform (Geometry) tab, choose 'Level.' Then apply it to all of the images you want to fix. That's it!
Match Total Exposures Function
The Match Total Exposures function will match the overall exposure of a group of images, so they all look consistent. There are several scenarios for which this is very useful. However, there's one crucial thing to note about the match total exposure feature.
It uses your original camera settings to determine the exposure settings. If you have shot all the images in manual mode with the same settings, but the scene and then the exposure changed, this feature won't work.
In the develop panel, choose the first image you want the other images' exposures to match.
Get the exposure of that first image to how you want it.
Now shift-click to select all the photos you want to have the same exposure settings.
Go to the settings menu.
Select 'match total exposure' (alt-shift-command-M for the shortcut).
Location-based Presets for Lightroom
Using location-based presets can be very handy if you often shoot in the same location or repeatedly do a series of shoots.
Also, you can use a radial filter over the entire image and then input the desired exposure in the radial filter sliders. To change the intensity, press alt-click and drag either left or right on the image to simultaneously reduce/increase the opacity of the settings of every slider.
Conclusion
We hope you've found these four tips for improving your workflow helpful. We've written about other workflow tips, including wedding workflow improvements. You can read those for more tips. Whenever you can improve your workflow, you're saving time. Ultimately, that can mean getting work into your client's hands more quickly. That's a good thing because a happy client means a happy photographer, after all!