Digital Media | Spotlight: Photography | Inside Lightroom | Blogs
More Hidden Surprises
In an earlier blog I wrote about Lightroom's contextual menus, which are like hidden Easter eggs sprinkled throughout the user interface, revealed with a right/click of the mouse. But, hey, there are more surprises!
Try this and you'll see what I mean: Hold the option/alt key while clicking on and moving the Exposure slider in the Develop module.
What's going on? Lightroom is revealing in real time the clipped areas of an image with black representing unclipped areas. (Clipped means areas are so dark or so bright detail is missing.) Do this with the Recovery and Blacks sliders and you'll also get clipping feedback in the image preview window.
My favorite hidden slider option, up to now, is found in the Split Toning pane. Until I learned about it, I found it hard to see what color tint I was working with. I found I needed to move the Saturation slider first, then the Hue slider to see what I was getting. A much quicker way is to hold the option/alt key and then click and slide the Hue slider. The tint now appears in the preview window. See here what I mean?
The tint changes as you slide the Hue slider, as shown here.
After I get the tint I'm looking for I adjust the Saturation slider to get exactly the look I'm after. Way cool!
PS: I'm not sure what to call these "option/alt" sliders. Contextual sliders? Anyone know the correct term?
Comments (3)
Just to tease you but if you had checked out http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/archives/tips/page/6/
You would've learned about this back in December.
Hey Tim thanks for reference. Some good stuff there!
Mikkel, thanks for another interesting hidden feature. I stumbled upon one of my own, which doesn't seem to be in the manual, and I haven't seen posted.
When I started with Lightroom I thought the Color Label feature was pretty useless because it was so inflexible. Five colors was not very much across a whole workflow. That was until I discovered what seems to be a little secret about user defined label sets. It seems that Lightroom not only remembers which color label you've applied, but surprisingly, which label set it was applied from. The color chosen always shows in the metadata panel, but the color highlighting is only done if the correct label set chosen.
This means I can have different label sets for use in each stage of my workflow e.g. a set for initial review, a set for tagging and captioning, and another for editing, and so on. Images which are color labelled in initial review show no highlighting while I'm working on tagging for example.
Maybe you've already come across this, or it may be of interest to your other readers.
My fear is that it will turn out to be a bug, and it'll get "fixed".