Editing Made Easy – Copying Edits in Lightroom
Editing… Often it feels like a royal pain. I mean, you’ve just been out and about and enjoying taking [hundreds] of photos and all of a sudden you realize they’re not quite ready to go. Import, organize, edit, export and repeat. Over and over again.
We’re going to share with you a really fast, simple and effective way of speeding up your editing workflow (other great speed & shortcut tips to come!).
So you’ve captured a series of photos – these photos all look, well, kind of the same. They were taken in a similar setting with similar lighting etc. Rather than edit each photo individually, but with the aim of making it look the same, Lightroom has a great syncing or copying/pasting tool that allows you to edit just one photo in the series and copy these settings over to the rest. This means that you spend your time delicately editing just one photo, and then touching up the rest.
How do we do this?
In the “Edit” Module of Lightroom you have 2 main options. Here they are:
Option 1: Copy & Paste
- Edit your main photo.
- In the menu options, go to “Settings” and then “Copy Settings”
- Choose your options for the settings to copy (for example, you may not want to copy the crop you did on the main photo, but you do want to copy everything else).
- Go to the photo you want to edit.
- In the menu options, go to “Settings” and then “Paste Settings”.
- Now you should see your photo edits apply – and then you can finish your final touch-up.
Option 2: Sync Edits
- Edit your main photo.
- Select all of your photos, starting with the main photo, in the bottom selection of images.
- Right click on your first image.
- Select “Develop Settings” and then “Sync Settings”.
- Choose your options for the settings to copy (for example, you may not want to copy the crop you did on the main photo, but you do want to copy everything else).
- Then select “Synchronize” and you should see your edits apply across all of the images you selected.
- Finish your final touch up of the images you synchronized the settings to.
And that’s what we like to call editing made easy!
Looking for a how-to guide to Lightroom that starts at the very beginning? We offer our Lightroom Photo-Editing Course in all of our great cities. Join our course to learn more about how Lightroom works, how an editing workflow can look, and get some seriously hands-on experience playing with importing, organizing, editing and exporting photos in this amazing software.
We also offer fantastic Private Tuition sessions where we can come to your home and assist you with anything you desire – from editing to organizing to sorting out what happened to your missing photos! Get in touch with us today for more details or to book a session.
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