When I’m working in the studio, I have a 30” Apple Cinema Display so the Lightroom layout works fine for me as is, but when I’m in the field working on a laptop with a 15” screen, every bit of space helps. If you’ve had to do much scrolling in any of the Lightroom modules, particularly the Develop module, eliminating items that you don’t need is not only helpful, but it speeds up your workflow as well.

You already know that you can expand or collapse groups of controls by clicking on the triangle to the right of the panel name. But you can also modify what’s shown in a couple of other ways as well. If you right-click (Control+click on Mac) on the panel titlebar, you’ll see a list of all the panels for that module.

You can see here that the selected panel, Basic, has an asterisk next to the name. If you want only the selected panel to be displayed, click on Solo Mode to hide all other panels. To get them back, uncheck Solo Mode. You can also choose to collapse and expand all panels.

Finally, you can choose which panels are displayed. After all, if you never use the adjustments in one of the panels, why have it there at all? Even collapsed it’s taking a little space up showing the titlebar. To remove the panel, right click on the titlebar and uncheck the panel you don’t want displayed. This works in all modules, so you can customize Lightroom for your specific needs. For example, I never use the Quick Develop items in the Library module, so I have that unchecked to give me more room for the Keywording and Metadata panels.

That's it for this week.