5 Lightroom Tips to Edit Photos Faster
Adobe Lightroom is a powerful tool, but it can be much quicker and more fun to use if you know what you’re doing! Anything that help me up my editing game get me excited. I hope it will help you, too. It all adds up over time, and you’ll start getting better results, too!
Who wouldn’t enjoy spending less time on the technicalities of editing and more time being creative? I know I would! So I thought I’d share my 5 best Lightroom tips for doing just that.
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These are somewhat advanced tips, so if you’ve already got a handle on the basics of editing in Lightroom, you’re in the right place! That said, if you’re just starting to learn your way around Lightroom, this can also help you be more efficient from the get-go. We’re not going to talk about things like what each slider does in this article, but if that’s something you’d like to see, please leave a comment and let me know! And if you don’t have Lightroom yet and want to try it out, they do have a free trial too!
Let’s get started with those Lightroom tips!
1. Deciding exactly which photos you will edit (before you start editing)
When I first started editing in Lightroom, I made this mistake all. the. time. I kept doing it even doing after I started working on professional photo shoots!
So if you’re doing this, I totally feel you! But please stop, immediately.
You will save so much time in the long run if you force yourself to make those hard decisions first.
The process of selecting which photos to edit is called culling.
And you absolutely need to be culling! Specifically, you need to be culling before you do a bunch of extra work you’re not going to use later anyway.
There are a lot of options for how to cull your photos. You can do it in Lightroom, or you can do it in a separate dedicated app like Photo Mechanic or Aftershoot AI. (More about Lightroom workflows and culling software options here if you’re trying to decide on a workflow!)
No matter what you use, the hard part is always going to be making those decisions.
My advice: when you’re culling your images, don’t just look for the obvious “no” photos to delete.
And if you can, try not to get stuck too much on the “maybe” photos either. You’re looking for the ones you’re most proud of, the ones you actually want to keep, hang on your wall, deliver to a client, post online—whatever it is!
This is one case where “out of sight, out of mind” is really going to help you in the long run.
Once your decisions are all made, don’t keep looking back at all the almost-as-good photos that didn’t make the cut. And definitely don’t edit them!
It’s okay if you have a couple you’re unsure of, but do not start off editing 100+ photos to see how they turn out if you’re only planning to keep or deliver 30. You’re not actually going to use 10 nearly identical photos for every single shot. And you certainly don’t need to waste time editing every single one, when you could be doing something else! So trust your instincts as much as you can, as early as you can.
If you’re looking to dive further into culling and how to do it better, I wrote more about efficient culling strategies and approaches here!
2. Collection sets and collections are your friends!
When you’ve decided what you’re going to edit, group photos by the location or type of lighting/time of day (eg. all your sunny outdoor shots in one collection, all your shots in the shade in another, indoor photos in another, etc.) and your batch editing will go much faster.
3. Match total exposure.
Oh my god, match total exposure! I only discovered the “match total exposure” Lightroom option relatively recently, and I wish I had known about it wayyyyy earlier! If you have several similar photos with similar light, but they’re not exposed quite the same, get one the way you like it, and then apply that match total exposure magic!
This is such a game changer, especially if you use any zoom lenses that don’t have a constant aperture.
I have a 70-300mm lens that goes from f/4 to f/5.6 when I zoom in (click here for my guide on lenses, btw), and it used to take me *forever* to go through and manually adjust the exposure in all the photos so that the ones at f/5.6 matched the ones at f/4. Now I just select them all and click one thing.
Why didn’t anyone tell me sooner?!
4. Batch edit.
If you use presets, apply them to your photos all at once, apply whatever basic edits you think apply to at least most of your shoot, and then start looking through them one by one. When you get a photo the way you love it, you can copy and paste all those edits over to the next photo, or any photo that’s similar! I recommend going through the checkboxes that pop up and checking only the boxes that you actually want to copy over.
You can fine tune this as much as you want, but in general for similar photos I usually check everything except things like gradient, spot removal, crop, and perspective shifts, and depending on the photo I might decide to check or uncheck the boxes for exposure and white balance.
5. If you don’t already use presets in Lightroom, consider starting to use presets!
You don’t have to buy them or use anyone else’s at all—although you can! Presets are easy to make, and I make presets for myself all the time!
To get started making your own Lightroom presets, pay attention to the kinds of edits you find yourself making repeatedly.
Do you pretty much always bring up your exposure when you edit? (Hi, me too! I underexpose all. the. time.) Do you adjust highlights and shadows, or play around with your tone curve?
Next time you start editing a photo, stop after you do all those basic edits and save it as a preset before you start doing more fine-tuned adjustments.
I’d recommend looking over those checkboxes again before saving—any category that’s checked in a preset will overwrite the edits already in that category, so it’s safest to only check the ones where you actually made changes.
Hit save, and you’re done—you just saved future you a ton of time!
Bonus tips for the professional photographers and the Lightroom power users!
If you’re someone who is spending a lot, and I mean a lot of time editing in Lightroom, and if you’re willing to invest some money in speeding it up a lot, I have two extra ideas for you!
Within Lightroom, I rely heavily on keyboard shortcuts, and I took it to the next level with keyboard mapping.
Basically, keyboard mapping means that you have easy shortcuts for every Lightroom option you use frequently. Instead of using a mouse, you can basically type to get your edits done!
This is something I got into for ergonomic reasons at first. Clicking and dragging all day long on a laptop is not good for your wrists! But I also love it because it makes my edits go SO much faster. It’s second nature to me now!
There are endless ways to do keyboard mapping, really. Personally I have all my basic go-to sliders mapped to the left side of my keyboard, so for example typing Q and W increases or decreases the temperature of the photo, E and R control the tint, etc. That means that my right hand can be free to be on the trackpad or usually my editing tablet for quick cropping or retouching.
For my keyboard mapping, I use a subscription software called Power Keys to do this, and I love it! It’s the most seamless, bug-free option I’ve found so far, and it’s so, so worth the money to me. If you want to try it, you can get $10 off an annual subscription with the promo code PAIGE.
Some other photographers prefer to use additional control pads like the Loupedeck or even video game controllers. I haven’t had the opportunity (or the desk space) to try those out yet, but I’ll report back if I do!
And if you’re a high-volume photographer, or if you do go with a service like Aftershoot that I mentioned earlier for culling, you should know that AI editing is also a thing, and it’s increasingly good!
As I said about AI-assisted culling, I would never recommend just hitting a button and calling it a day. Where is the artistic creativity in that anyway, and where’s the fun? But it can take the preset idea to the next level and give you a really great starting point.
I have started playing around with this, and the time that I save even just straightening photos alone is huge! Aftershoot edits is my current favorite. They do have some AI-assisted presets that can get you started right out of the box, especially with the basics like white balance, exposure, and straightening. But to really get the most out of it, it’s best if you have lots (like, multiple thousands) of images that you’ve already edited in Lightroom. If you do, you can train your own AI editing preset, and the app will do its best to mimic your personal style. But again, please don’t just rely on that and call it a day, especially if you’re working on photos for clients who rely on you for professional polish! Use it as a tool to produce better work, don’t just try to replace yourself.
And lastly…
Don’t let editing overwhelm you, or make you want to give up! It’s supposed to be a creative tool, not something big and scary. It’s okay if you aren’t comfortable with every single slider at the beginning, or if you feel slow at first. Just keep learning and testing out new things when you can! Even just one new thing can make it a little more fun, so try one of these Lightroom tips the next time you sit down for an editing session. My hope is one of these 5 Lightroom tips will help make editing both faster and more enjoyable, so you can be more creative and get more done!
If you’d like more photography tips or resources, you can also check out my resource list for photographers! And if you have a favorite tip you think other photographers should know about, or something you’re struggling with, I’d love to hear from you in the comment section below so we can all learn together!
