- Making Your RAW Photos Look More Like JPEGs
- Setting the White Balance
- Setting Your White Balance Live While Shooting Tethered
- Seeing Befores and Afters
- My Editing Your Images Cheat Sheet
- Controlling Overall Brightness Using the Exposure Slider
- Automatically Matching Exposures
- 60 Seconds on the Histogram (& Which Slider Controls Which Part)
- Auto Tone (Having Lightroom Do the Work for You)
- Dealing With Highlight Problems (Clipping)
- Opening Up the Shadows (Like "Fill Light" on a Slider)
- Setting Your White Point and Black Point
- Adding "Punch" to Your Images Using Clarity
- Making Your Colors More Vibrant
- Adding Contrast (and How to Use the Tone Curve)—This Is Important Stuff!
- Applying Changes Made to One Photo to Other Photos
- Auto Sync: Perfect for Editing a Bunch of Photos at Once
- Using the Library Module's Quick Develop Panel
- The "Previous" Button (and Why It Rocks!)
- Putting It All Together (Doing a Start-to-Finish Tweak)
- Lightroom Killer Tips > >
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Seeing Befores and Afters
In the first white balance project at the beginning of this chapter, I ended with a before and after, but I didn’t get a chance to show you how I did that. I love the way Lightroom handles the whole before and after process because it gives you a lot of flexibility to see these the way you want to see them. Here’s how:
Step One:
Any time you’re working in the Develop module and you want to see what your image looked like before you started tweaking it (the “before” image), just press the \ (backslash) key on your keyboard. You’ll see the word “Before” appear in the upper-right corner of your image, as seen here. In this image, you’re seeing the overly cool original image. This is probably the Before view I use the most in my own workflow. To return to your After image, press the \ key again (it doesn’t say “After;” the Before just goes away).
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To see a side-by-side Before and After view (shown here on top), press the letter Y on your keyboard. If you prefer a split-screen view, then click the little Before and After Views button in the bottom-left corner of the toolbar under your preview (as shown here on the bottom. If you don’t see the toolbar for some reason, press the letter T to make it visible). If you click the Y button again, instead of a side-by-side before and after, you get a top/bottom before and after. Click it again, and you get a top/bottom split screen before and after. The next set of buttons (to the right of Before & After) don’t change your view, they change the settings. For example, the first one copies the Before image’s settings to the After image, the second one copies the After’s settings to the Before image, and the third one just swaps the Before/After settings. To return to Loupe view, just press the letter D on your keyboard.
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