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Love Those Contextual Menus!
Lightroom has plenty of hidden contextual menus, and like Easter eggs, they are fun to find. To reveal one of these menus simply place your cursor over a thumbnail, panel pane, or work area and right-click. On a Mac hold the Ctrl key when you click. A menu with very useful options will immediately pop-up on the screen, ready to help stream-line your workflow, or just make your work environment more friendly.
Here are a few of my favorite contextual menu options:
Right click on a panel pane.
I really like the Solo mode, which keeps only one pane open at a time and helps keep my work space uncluttered. (This control works on a panel by panel basis.)
Right click on a thumbnail in the Filmstrip or Library Grid mode.
I often select Show in Finder, which takes me automatically to the original location of the image file. This is very useful when I want to duplicate a RAW file or otherwise find my original.
Right click on the Panel End Marker (Flourish by default).
Options here are for purely for cosmetic purposes. You can choose to get rid of the Panel End Maker, or swap the Flourish graphic with another.
Right click on the Develop module histogram.
This contextual menu offers control over the way clipping is indicated.
Ok, that's enough to give you a good idea of what I'm talking about. What are your favorites? I'm sure I'm missing some good ones.
Comments (4)
Let me wage a one man campaign to remind everyone that right-clicking on a Mac (rather than Ctrl-clicking) is not only possible it is more than likely what most people do.
Two button mice rule and even laptops do it!!! :)
Thanks for the great tips!!
Jim
Great tips, thanks for this! :)
My one man campaign would be to get all these options into the proper menu structure. I don't use Lightroom myself (yet) so maybe this is the wrong place to comment, but contextual menus aren't obvious places to look for some people. The main menus are scrubbable more easily than finding the exact panel that opens the context menu you want, after all.