Adobe Lightroom Tips, Tutorials & Techniques

Adobe Lightroom is great at accomplishing a lot of things. You can sharpen and blur a photo, add or remove contrast, clarity, vibrance, exposure and adjust many more aspects of the Basic panel. You can even add targeted gradients that will alter the photos’ temperature so it looks warmer in one area and cooler in another. Lens correction, split toning, vignetting – the list goes on. But, as much as Lightroom can do, there are some areas where it simply can’t compete with Photoshop. There comes a time in every photographer or designer’s life when they realize they’re going to have to incorporate the big guns.

There’s an inherent issue with what I just wrote above. Oftentimes, when working on editing a photograph, we don’t necessarily know what needs to be done. Sometimes, we make a change and have to build off that change. What if we begin editing in Lightroom and then realize that the image should have been edited in Photoshop first? This might happen when you reach a point where Lightroom doesn’t offer the tool you need. What do you do? Do you start over? That wouldn’t be good. What would be good is if there was a way to jump back and forth between Lightroom and Photoshop. Oh yes, that would be very good. Well, just as luck would have it, there is.

In today’s post, I’m going to work on a photo of a bull that has a tag in his ear (see the photo below). I’ll begin the project by opening the photo in Lightroom and making some simple edits in the Basic panel. Then, I’ll jump into Adobe Photoshop straight from Lightroom to remove the tag using the Content Aware fill command. After that, I’ll switch back to Lightroom to continue my edits on the updated photo. In this tutorial, I’ll show you all the necessary steps to seamlessly work in both applications.

NOTE: This post discusses how to complete this type of operation when dealing with JPEG files. If you’re interested in how do accomplish something similar with RAW files, please read this post:

How to Edit RAW Files in Photoshop From Adobe Lightroom

Original Photo

I want you to take a close look at the right ear (your left) of this bull. If you do this, you should see a tag. This tag is my primary focus of the edits I’ll make in Photoshop.

Please also notice how dull this photo is in its original state. I’ll brighten it up in Lightroom.

Editing in Lightroom

I’ve already gone ahead and imported this photo into my working folder in Lightroom. If you aren’t familiar with how to import photos, please read my post on just that:

How To Import Photographs Into Adobe Lightroom

Now that I’ve got the photo where I want, I can select it from the filmstrip choices at the bottom of the program and work on it in Loupe View. If you don’t yet know how to access the various modes of viewing photos in Lightroom, take a look at this post:

Viewing Photos In Different Modes Inside Adobe Lightroom

I’ll then click on the Develop link towards the top of the application.

From there, I’ll push around some sliders in an effort to brighten the photo up some. Don’t worry so much about this part. This post doesn’t focus on working in the Basic panel as much as it does how to jump to Photoshop from Lightroom.

That looks a lot better. It’s really starting to come along nicely.

Oh man – wouldn’t you know it? I completely forgot to remove that tag in the bull’s ear before beginning this project. Now what am I going to do? In this case, I only spent a few seconds on my edits and starting over wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, but what if I had spent an hour working on this photo before I realized I screwed up? What I’d like to do is switch into Adobe Photoshop right from Lightroom and then back again, if at all possible.

Jumping to Photoshop From Lightroom

If I head up to the Photo > Edit In > Edit in Adobe Photoshop CC 2015 menu item and select it…

…I’ll be presented with a dialog box like this:

Now, the available choices are important. I’ll go over them below.

Edit a Copy with Lightroom Adjustments – This choice will bring a copy of the current version of the photo into Adobe Photoshop. All the edits that were made to the photo in Lightroom will remain intact.

Edit a Copy – This choice will make a copy of the original photo and import that copy into Photoshop. No edits made in Lightroom will be visible in Photoshop.

Edit Original – This choice will import the original file, with no edits made in Lightroom, into Photoshop for editing.

As you can see by reading the explanation of the choices above, it’s usually a good idea to select the first one. Since I already made edits in Lightroom, I want to keep those edits and continue my work in Photoshop. There’s no sense in doing anything else. I’ll go ahead and make the first selection.

Editing in Photoshop

After I click Edit in Lightroom, my photo opens into a new tab in Photoshop. I can now remove that tag from the bull’s ear. To accomplish this, I’ll click on the Lasso Tool and draw a circle around the tag. This will turn into a selection.

From here, I’ll right-click on the image and choose Fill from the menu that appears. Please note that the Lasso Tool still needs to be active for the right-click menu to appear.

When I see the Fill dialog box, I’ll select Content-Aware from the top drop-down box and click OK. This will intelligently fill the area that contains the tag with a pattern from the surrounding area. If you’d like to learn more about how to remove object with content-aware fill, please read through this post:

Removing Objects with Content-Aware Fill in Adobe Photoshop

Once finished in Photoshop, all I need to do is head up to the File > Save menu item and click on it.

The file will stay open in Photoshop, but when I return to Lightroom, I’ll see the updated version of the photo that I was working on.

It’s like magic. I didn’t have to do anything else – the photo was just sitting there waiting for me.

An Edit Copy Was Created

I do want to point out one more thing. If I click G on my keyboard as a shortcut to switch to Grid Mode in Lightroom, I’ll notice that a copy of the photo I was working on was made.

This copy is in TIF format and has been converted from a JPG format, which is what I was initially working with. In later posts, I’ll be discussing how to go about the same exact scenario, but when we’re working with RAW files. Either way, at this point, I can simply continue on with my edits in Lightroom as if I never had to jump to Photoshop for anything at all.

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When it comes to transforming a color photo into a black and white photo, Adobe Lightroom and Camera Raw are virtually one and the same. As I’ve mentioned in quite a few previous posts, Camera Raw’s processing engine is built into Lightroom. This may be why the two application’s Basic panels look almost identical. So, if you know how to create a black and white in Camera Raw, you already know how to do it in Lightroom as well. There are a few minor differences, which I’ll cover in the post below. By the way, if you want to read the posts I wrote a while back where I talked about Camera Raw’s insane ability to make almost any black and white photo look good, take a look here:

Creating Black & White Photos in Adobe Camera Raw

How To Enhance Black & White Portraits in Adobe Camera Raw

In today’s post, I’ll discuss the proper method for converting a color photograph into a black and white one in Adobe Lightroom. Basically, I’ll teach you how to do it. It’s not as simple as reducing the saturation to zero. While it’s not very complicated either, it does require some discussion and clarification of a few important points.

Now, if you’re a follower of this website, you may be asking why I’m writing this post at all. I mean, I already wrote one where I walked through a project that’s very closely related to this one, where I used Camera Raw. If these two programs are so similar, why duplicate my efforts? Well, I’ll tell you. Because I have to. It seems that almost every photographer I talk to uses Lightroom. I have yet to see and have a conversation with anyone who uses Camera Raw. While my preference is to take advantage of all Camera Raw has to offer, it seems as though that’s not the preference of the rest of the world. So, when someone searches in Google, “How do I create a black and white photo using Adobe Lightroom?,” I won’t show up anywhere. And that’s a shame, because I think I share some relatively thorough information here.

I also LOVE writing posts. Let’s not forget that. I truly adore filling this site chock full of the good stuff.

Below is the original photo that I’ll be using in this post. I haven’t done anything to it yet.

Before I ever go anywhere near the black and white controls, I like to edit the way I would any other photo. This begins in the Basic panel. My usual routine is to adjust almost all the sliders. Typically, I’ll leave Temperature (unless necessary), Tint, Shadows and Saturation alone. I’ve found that the other sliders do a remarkable job of adding enough contrast, exposure and color. If you look at the next screenshot, you’ll see my usual settings over to the right.

By making these adjustments, I am rewarded with a photo that looks like this. I’d say it’s much better than the original.

Now, just by using the Basic panel, the black and white version will have much more depth than if I hadn’t done anything.

To convert the photo to black and white, I’ll click on the Basic panel header to close it and then click on the B&W header to open that one. Just by clicking on the black and white header, my photo is transformed.

As you may have already noticed, there are a few sliders in this new panel. These sliders control the luminance of each color in the image. I know you can’t see the colors anymore and that’s the beauty of using this method over simply desaturating a photo. If you use this panel to convert an image to black and white, you have ample adjustments at your fingertips. Here is the photo before any further adjustments have been made.

Before I even go any further, I know that I want to adjust the sky. To me, it’s flat. The blue is too close to the white of the clouds and neither offers much in the way of differentiation. To deal with this, I’ll push the blue slider to the left to darken the blue.

I also know that I want to brighten the sand up so it’s more clear and at the forefront of the photo. Right now, it’s not saying much to me. The thing is, I can’t remember what color the sand is. Also, I’m not sure that if I knew the color, I’d be able to guess what the color mix is and which slider to push. Good thing there’s a tool to help with this.

If I roll over the small circle in the upper left part of the B&W panel, the following words will appear: Adjust Black & White Mix By Dragging in the Photo.

If I click inside this circle, the black and white adjustment tool will be activated. If I click inside it again, the tool will be deactivated. Since I want to adjust the luminosity of the sand, I’ll click inside the circle. Then, I’ll bring my mouse pointer to the area I’d like to adjust, click and drag either up or down. Up brightens and down darkens. I’ll click and drag up and then show the resulting photo. Basically, the tool selects whichever color you place your mouse over and drag from and edits that particular color.

As you can see, the sand is much brighter now. The primary color that was adjusted was orange. Now, the orange slider is pushed all the way to the right. I’ll go ahead and click the circle again to turn the tool off.

If you look at the above photo and then again at the preceding black and white version, you’ll see that this latest one has a shadow that’s much more visible. This is called drama (photographers and editors love this word). By editing the black and white version of this photo using the B&W panel, I was able to make dramatic changes, which always coverts to a better looking image.

I think these changes look good and I’m going to leave the rest alone. What I am going to do, though, is head back into the Basic panel and bump the Contrast slider to the right to bring that shadow out some more. This is the final version of the photo.

Whenever you can bring out the differences in shades in a black and white, it’s a good thing.

While working, it’s fairly common to view the before and after versions of the photo you’re working on. Because of this, I felt it important to tell you how to do this. In Lightroom, every panel has a small before and after switch. If you click it once, your changes will disappear and if you click it again, they’ll reappear. Please take a look at the screenshot below to see where the switch is located.

And finally, here is a before and after shot of the black and white versions of the photo I’ve been working on. I made the after version on the left because of the shadow. The before is on the right. The after shot is much more striking.

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In Adobe Lightroom, there are a few tools that will help you quickly and easily adjust a photo’s exposure. Each of these tools is designed to assist with gaining as much benefit as possible, but without pushing things too far. If you increase or decrease exposure for a photo, the outcome may look good on your computer screen, but might not be suffice for print. With the use of the tools I’ll discuss below, you exponentially increase your chances for success.

In today’s post, I’ll work with a sample photo in Lightroom. I’ll show you how to edit the photo’s exposure and explain what clipping indicators are. Lastly, I’ll demonstrate how best to go about comparing the original photo with the modified one.

If you take a look at the screenshot below, you’ll see that I’ve launched Lightroom and have chosen the image that I’ll be working with.

The reason I think this picture will be good to work with is because it’s got some very bright light that’s coupled with some dark, if not black, areas. As I go through the post and talk about the clipping indicators, you’ll see why this is beneficial.

When I refer to exposure in this post, I’ll be talking about a few different sliders in the Basic panel of Adobe Lightroom. Specifically, I’ll be referring to the Exposure, Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks. The are the sliders that can affect what we consider to be too bright or too dark. When we go to the extreme in either of these areas, we lose what’s called “data.” If data is lost, we lose detail in a photo. So, instead of the photo displaying actual gradients and pixels that represent reality, they display solid white or black. Unless you’re going for that sort of look, that’s no good.

If you look at the above screenshot, you’ll see some areas that I enclosed in red. The first one I want you to look at is the lower Basic panel. In there are the sliders I was referring to above. Secondly, if you’ll notice in the red circle, you’ll see two triangles at the top of the histogram. Those triangles control whether or not the clipping indicators are turned on or off. The concept is very similar to one I already discussed inside of Adobe Camera Raw. If you’d like, you can read that post here:

Using the Histogram Clipping Warnings in Adobe Camera Raw

Basically, when the clipping indicators aren’t active (no white square around the triangle), you can adjust the aforementioned sliders without warning of going too far. I’ll show you an example below.

If you look at the photo above, you’ll certainly recognize that it’s wildly over and under exposed. And if you look at the slider in the Basic panel, you can see how I did this. I pushed each exposure slider as far as it would go, one way or another. Now, if I couldn’t see that well, I might think this looks good. I’d save the image and go off and print it or post it somewhere, only to become embarrassed later on when someone explained to me what I had done wrong.

The way clipping indicators work is this; if I push a slider to a point where the image begins to lose data or detail, an overlay of either red or blue will appear on the photo. These colors will cover the over or underexposed area. Red is for over-exposure and blue is for under-exposure. I’ll go ahead and click to activate the clipping indicators now. Let’s see what happens to the photo.

Wow – I’ve got some serious issues. I’ll go ahead and move the sliders so they’re only half-way pushed in either direction. Let’s see how the clipping indicators look after that. I’ll leave them on.

That’s looking a little better. Now, I’ll push the sliders so no clipping is showing at all.

If you look very closely, you’ll see just a hint of red and blue. This isn’t bad at all. I’ll keep it like this. Apparently, this photo has had its dynamic range pushed as far as it can go. Aren’t familiar with dynamic range? Check out this post:

How To Use Your Camera Histogram For Awesome Photos

Earlier in this post, I mentioned that you may be after a certain look with your photos. Personally, I don’t really rely on the clipping indicators because I know I go too far. Sometimes, whites need to be white and blacks need to be black. I eyeball things quite frequently.

When I do this, I find that comparing the before and after versions of whatever photo it is I’m working on is helpful. Because of this, I felt that it may be beneficial for me to explain how I go about this.

In the above screenshot, I circled the area I use to control which before and after view I’d like to use. As you can see, there are a few different alternatives. There are Before/After Left/Right, Before/After Left/Right Split, Before/After Top/Bottom and Before/After Top/Bottom Split. In general, I prefer the “split” options because they show the image in halves and they are closer to each other, giving me a more accurate view of things.

If you’re looking for some keyboard shortcuts to control these options, you can head up to the View > Before/After menu item and either select the options that appear or read the keyboard shortcuts to the right of the options.

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A lot of people think that when they edit photo exposure in applications such as Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom and Camera Raw, they’re simply adjusting the photo’s brightness. In a way, they are. But that’s not all they’re doing. Sure they’re reducing the brightness of overexposed areas and increasing the brightness of underexposed areas, but really, they’re also removing dullness, adding vibrance, color, crispness and contrast. They’re bringing areas that once weren’t visible into the realm of visibility. It’s actually quite an important task. One of the most important, in fact.

In today’s post, I’m going to walk through the steps necessary to edit the exposure of a photograph in Adobe Lightroom. The photo I’ve chosen was taken by me during a stay in Palm Coast, Florida. It’s not a terrible shot, but it can certainly be taken up a notch with some light editing.

Now, I want to let you know that Lightroom and Camera Raw are close cousins when it comes to editing photos. If you know one, you know the other. My personal preference is to use Camera Raw, but I can definitely get on board with the organizational capabilities of Lightroom. Lightroom is an all-in-one package when it comes to taking care of the post-processing of photographs.

I wrote a few posts a while back that cover today’s topic – but I wrote those posts for Camera Raw. If you read through them, you’ll see uncanny similarities between the two programs. Their Basic panels are virtually identical. I wanted to let you know this because you may want to read through today’s post and then check out the others I wrote earlier. It’s good to become well rounded when working with Adobe applications. Here are some links to my earlier posts:

Editing a Photo Using the Basic Panel in Adobe Camera Raw

Fixing Under & Overexposure With Adobe Camera Raw

How To Make A Photo “Pop” With Adobe Camera Raw

If you read through the posts linked to above, along with what I write below, you’ll be well versed in how to correct photo exposure issues with either Lightroom or Camera Raw.

Original Photo

Below is the original photo. As I said earlier, it’s not terrible. My goal for today is to bring some life to it by using only limited tools in Lightroom. Since I’m concentrating on exposure only, I’ll restrict myself to adjusting the Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks sliders.

Editing Exposure

The first task I must complete is to analyze the photo. I need to take a close look at it to determine the reason I decided to bring it into Lightroom for editing in the first place. Since I’m working on exposure, I must have thought something was wrong with the lighting, saturation or contrast.

From looking through the various areas of the above photo, I think the issue is primarily that it’s slightly underexposed, although, there are some overexposed elements in it as well. If you look at some of the shiny areas of the leaves, and especially at the backside of the larger leaf toward the center of the photo, you’ll see that it’s washed out. I did some experimenting with that area earlier and I can tell you that the data is there. It’s just being hidden. I’m not confident that I can fix that particular area with these sliders alone, but I’ll give it a shot. What would really do the trick is an adjustment brush, which would allow me to reduce the exposure of just one area of an image. That’s a post for another time though.

Enhancing Photos with the Adjustment Brush in Adobe Camera Raw

Adjusting Exposure & Contrast

Since the photo is slightly underexposed and weak looking, I need to raise the exposure a bit. I’ll nudge the Exposure slider to the right just a small amount and then push the Contrast slider all the way to the right, in order to give the picture some vibrance.

Adjusting Highlights

By moving just these two sliders, I made a substantial change. It looks better already. The thing is, by increasing the exposure and contrast, those overexposed areas of the leaves are now really overexposed. They’re virtually white. To deal with this, I’m going to push the Highlights slider all the way to the left, to reduce the highlights as much as possible. Remember, the Highlights slider controls highlights in a photo, not whites. Whites have no data to them while highlights do. If you reduce whites, you’ll simply gray what’s white. If you reduce highlights, you’ll reduce the white, or glare, that’s hiding the data that’s in the washed out areas. It’s sort of confusing, so it’ll take some experimenting with those two sliders to see exactly what I’m talking about.

As you can see, by reducing the highlights, there wasn’t a huge change to the image. There is, however, more detail showing on the back of that one leaf though.

Adjusting Shadows

I like to think of shadows as those that are hiding the good stuff. So much of an image is hidden by darkness. It’s not completely obvious at first, but becomes plainly obvious when you start pushing the Shadows slider around. Under rocks, behind branches, in rooms you didn’t know were there – shadows are insidious and must be lit up.

I usually reduce the highlights as far as they can go and raise the shadows as far as they can go. Reducing highlights is relatively safe, but raising shadows can be dangerous. Too much and things start looking weird. In the case of this photo, I stopped about half way. I didn’t want to overdo it. But from what I did, some of what’s behind the vine came more into view.

Adjusting Whites & Blacks

When you adjust the whites and blacks in Lightroom, it’s sort of like you’re extending the previous slider’s abilities. These are roundabout methods for accentuating the outcomes of the Contrast, Highlights and Shadows sliders. I don’t want you to go nuts overthinking things, but if I push the Whites slider to the right some, it’s almost as though it’s a continuation of what the Shadows slider does. And if I push the Blacks slider to the left some, it’s almost as if it’s a continuation of what the Contrast and the Highlights sliders do. It’s interesting. Again, you’ll need to experiment with things for each photo. Each one is different and will require varying adjustments and strategies.

The Final Photo

I’ll post the final, edited photo below. Again, I limited myself to using only a few sliders, but I think things appear much better than they did earlier. I wasn’t able to fully correct the underside of the leaf because that’s an isolated area, but I may tackle that in a later post. For now, the photo has much more contrast, color and crispness.

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When it comes to adjusting white balance in Adobe Lightroom, many of the sliders and controls look remarkably similar to how they look in Camera Raw. I’d even go so far as to say that if you read or watch a tutorial that covers this topic specifically for Camera Raw, you’d be pretty much set to do the same thing in Lightroom. There are, however, a few important differences between the two applications.

In today’s post, I’ll be walking through a quick project that covers some of the more interesting aspects of adjusting the temperature and white balance in Lightroom. If you don’t use Lightroom, but still want to read my posts that cover the same topic for Camera Raw, you can do so here:

Can You Fix Photo White Balance With Adobe Camera Raw?

Adjusting White Balance of Multiple Photos In Adobe Camera Raw

If you’d like to read up on white balance when it comes to photography, I have a post that discusses that:

What Is White Balance In Photography?

Even if you’re familiar with the topic, I suggest you read the previous post. It’s got a lot of good information.

Demo Photo of Rose

I took the following photo at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park in Palm Coast, Florida. There’s a wonderful rose garden in the park and honestly, I’m not sure anyone could take enough pictures of the flowers. There are so many and most of them are multi-colored.

Now, I’ve gone ahead and quickly adjusted some of the basic sliders to give this photo a bit of contrast. Nothing crazy, but something that will show the alterations I make to the white balance more clearly.

Temperature & Tint Sliders

I thought I’d start at the very beginning. This is for those who aren’t very familiar with Lightroom at all. If you’ve already launched the application and have some photos imported, head into the Develop module by clicking Develop up in the top menu. From there, select a photo of your liking from the filmstrip panel at the bottom of the program.

After that, focus your attention on the Temperature and Tint sliders in the right panel.

These two sliders control the white balance of your photos. If you slide both of them back and forth a few times, you’ll quickly discover what they’re capable of. The Temperature slider alters the temperature of a photo from cool to warm and the Tint slider alters the tint of a photo from green to magenta. Between the use of both of these sliders, much can be accomplished when editing photos. I’d even go so far as to say that white balance is one of the most important areas of photo editing in general. That’s probably the reason it’s located so prominently (at the top) in the Basic panel.

White Balance Selector Tool

If you play inside the White Balance area for a while, you’ll most likely discover that randomly moving sliders in an effort to correct and set this aspect sometimes feels like you’re at the casino. You may get lucky, but you also may not. Unless you’ve got something specific in mind, moving sliders oftentimes isn’t the most productive method for changing the temperature and tint of a photograph.

Adobe Lightroom has a really cool feature. It comes in three parts. The first part is a selector tool. This looks like a a dropper – I’ve got it circled in red in the screenshot below. The second part is the color identifier, for lack of a better name. In the below screenshot, you can see this box hovering over the photo. Lastly, we have a preview, which can be found in the upper left corner. To enlarge this preview thumbnail, I clicked and dragged so the left column is wider than it normally is.

Basically, if you click on the dropper and then move it around the photo, you’ll see the color identifier box change colors. That’s based on the point that you’re hovering over with the dropper. As you move the dropper, the colors change, which in turn, change the white balance of the preview thumbnail. The reason I said this is a cool feature is because instead of simply and continuously clicking with the dropper to view and apply a new white balance, all you need to do is hover. When you see something like the white balance you’re after in the preview, you can click to apply it. After that, you can finesse the sliders to fine tune the temperature and tint.

Many of the photos you take might not have the white balance you want to see. To first correct this area, you need to find a neutral color in the photo, such as white or gray. Once you do, you can hover over there area to make sure it’s actually neutral (via the color identifier box – the RGB values are displayed – the more equal the values are, the more neutral the color is). While hovering, look at the preview and when happy, click to apply. I’ll do this below. My goal is to warm the photo up a bit. Right now, it’s too cool for my liking.

Even though the area I hovered over with the white balance selector is bluer than a neutral color would be, I was happy with it because the preview was nice and warm. I was going for a specific look here. Now, if I wanted to adjust further, I could do so with the sliders. This is the new white balance corrected photo.

When correcting a photograph’s white balance, you can base your decision around what you know should be white. For instance, if you’re a wedding photographer, the dress is most likely going to be white. You can click that with the White Balance Selector Tool. If you’re a portrait photographer and your model is wearing something white or gray, you can click on that. You can also use white balance cards. Those are a huge help.

Remember, there is usually a correct white balance. This value may or may not be to your liking. As a photographer and editor, you’ll need to experiment to find exactly what you’re looking for. The good news is that adjusting white balance happens to be extremely fun. It’s far reaching and gets many oohs and aahs.

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The funny thing about photography is that many of us really only take photos of a few genres, for lack of a better word. What I’m trying to say is that while we think we’re out there everyday, snapping photos of anything and everything, in reality, we’re either people, animal, nature, landscape or portrait people. Personally, I’ve never taken a real photo of a person. I also don’t tend to focus on animals very much either. In general, I stick to nature and food photography. If you look through 99% of my photographs over the past 5 years, you’ll see strong evidence of this.

Adobe Lightroom has a really great tool for people like me (and possibly you). Since keywords have proven to come in very handy while organizing photos, the developers of Lightroom have decided to add an area where we can create keyword sets and quickly and easily click on regularly used keywords that are held inside of that set. I’ll explain more below.

In this post, I’ll cover how to locate the keyword sets area, how to select keywords from those sets, how to edit a keyword set and finally, how to create sets of your own.

The Keywording Panel

In my install of Lightroom, I happen to have the Keywording panel available to me in the right column. Since it was already there, I simply clicked the small gray arrow on the right side of the label to expand the panel.

Now, if you don’t see the Keywording panel, you can simply visit the Window > Panels > Keywording menu item and select it. The expanded or collapsed panel will appear in your workspace.

Keyword Sets

Once I have the Keywording panel expanded so I can see inside, I can head down to the Keyword Sets area at the bottom of the panel and click the small gray arrow to expand that.

If you look closely at the keywords within this Portrait Photography set (from the pulldown), you’ll notice that there are 9 of them. Each of these default keywords describes portrait photography in one way or another.

If I want to move from the Portrait Photography selection to something else, I can click on the pull-down and choose something else. Currently, I’ve got Outdoor Photography and Wedding Photography as alternates.

Since many of my photos that I’m working with for this post have to do with the outdoors, I’ll select that one.

How To Apply Keywords From Keyword Sets

Applying keywords from keyword sets is super simple. All we need to do is click the ones we want. Once we do that, we’ll see that it’s been applied and is sitting up in the Keyword Tags area (in the same panel).

If we want to apply keywords to a different photo, we’ll need to click that next thumbnail and then apply the appropriate keywords to it like we just did.

Editing Keyword Sets

Oftentimes, the keyword sets that come with Adobe Lightroom won’t apply to your specific situation. That’s fine because we can create our own. Although, if the idea behind a certain set is good and all you need to do is edit a few keywords inside of it, we can do that to.

To edit keywords inside a particular keyword set, I’ll click on the drop-down again and choose Edit Set. By doing this, I’m essentially telling Lightroom that I’d like to change some of the keywords that are currently applied to the specific set I’m working with.

After I make that selection, I’ll be presented with a dialog box.

In the above dialog, I went ahead and switched out Fall for Ocean, Winter for Trees and so forth. I Basically customized the keywords for my needs. Once I was finished with that, I clicked on the Change button at the bottom of the dialog. After that, the keywords in that set were updated.

Creating a New Keyword Set

Now, I’m not sure if you noticed this or not, but when I clicked Edit Set in the previous section, there was a drop-down box at the top of the dialog. The value in the drop-down was the set I was working in (as I already mentioned). The thing is, if I edited the keywords to such a degree that they no longer applied to the Outdoor Photography set, I might want to create an entirely new set with a different name. I’ll do this and use my photos from Washington Oaks State Park as an example. We’ll pretend that I go to that park every weekend and having a keyword set just for that area would be beneficial.

To create a new keyword set, I’d first update the 9 keywords in the keyword fields. After that, I’d click the drop-down that’s located at the top of the dialog box and choose Save Current Settings As New Preset.

Once that’s finished, I would name my new preset and click Create. In my case, I called the new keyword set Washington Oaks State Park.

Finally, once it’s named, click Change again and the new keyword set will appear as a choice in the drop-down that’s located in the Keywording panel. If it’s selected, the keywords inside of it will be available for selection.

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If you’re interested in adding keywords to photos, please take a look at my previous Lightroom post. I discussed a few good topics surrounding this idea. I actually even talked about one method of how to filter photos by keyword there as well. In this post though, I’d like to go a bit further. Not too much further, because the entire body of knowledge necessary to accomplish this task is small. Nevertheless, if you’d like to use Lightroom to its fullest potential, this is something you’ll need to know.

As I just mentioned, in this post, I’ll cover how to filter photos by keyword. Of course, we can only filter those photos that have had keywords previously applied to them. So if you’re following along, please be sure to have added some metadata to the photos in your collection.

My Photos

As in some of my previous posts, I’ll be working with my photos from Washington Oaks State Park in Palm Coast, Florida. I’ve already got my catalog open and ready to go.

Keyword List Panel

Even though I covered this in my last post, I’ll quickly go over it once more here. To quickly and easily filter photos by keyword, you can use the Keyword List panel. I’ve outlined this panel in the second screenshot below.

If this panel isn’t available to you in the right column, you can activate it by going to the top menu and choosing Window > Panel > Keyword List Panel.

In this panel, you can see that I clicked on the Leaves keyword. If I hover over that keyword, a small white arrow will appear on the right side of it. If I click that small white arrow, all thumbnails in the center column will disappear, except for the ones with that keyword applied to it.

Filter Bar

A more thorough method of filtering photos is through the Filter Bar. To activate the Filter Bar for view, simply head back up to the top menu and click on View > Show Filter Bar.

Once you do that, the bar will appear above the thumbnails in the center column.

If you click on the Metadata link that’s contained inside the top row of the Filter Bar, you’ll see some boxes appear below. The box we’re currently concerned with is all the way to the left and it’s called Keyword.

Depending on how many keywords you’ve got applied to your photos, you may or may not be able to scroll this box. In my case, I can. And as an example, I clicked on the Outdoors keyword, which returned just those photographs that have that keyword applied to them. You can see this in the above screenshot.

Now, the reason I mentioned that this method was more thorough its Keyword List panel counterpart is because the Filter Bar has a lot of options available to us. In the future, we’ll go over all of these, but for right now, just know that the Keywords box is the one to use when filtering photographs by applied keyword.

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I’ve already talked a bit about keywords in both Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Bridge. Basically, the “keyword” feature allows users to identify their images by way of characters. If you apply a keyword to an image, you’ll ultimately have the ability to filter though all of your images to locate just the one with that specific keyword attached to it. If you apply the same keyword to multiple images and then filter once more, those multiple images will be returned. Think of how a search engine on the internet works. It’s almost the same idea.

If you’d like to review my previous posts on the topic, you can do so by following the links below.

Adding Keywords in Adobe Bridge

Develop Settings, Metadata & Keywords in Adobe Lightroom

In this post, I’m going to share how to go about applying keywords to images in Lightroom. I’ll warn you now – it’s extremely simple. After I’m finished covering how to apply keywords, I’ll quickly demonstrate how we can easily filter some images by using the keywords we added.

My Collection

As an example photo gallery in this post, I’ll be using my trusted “Washington Oaks State Park” images. I’ve used these before on this website and they’ve work out well. I’ll give you a screenshot of what they look like below.

Displaying the Keyword Panel

In order to apply a keyword or keywords to a photo, we’ll need to first open up the “Keywording” panel over at the right side of the application. To open the panel, all we need to do is to click on the small white arrow that’s sitting at the side of the panel title.

Applying Keywords

There are a few different methods of applying keywords to an image. Each method requires that you select at least one photo, so in our case, I’ll click on the thumbnail of the red flower in the upper left corner. Once an image is selected, I can head over to the Keywording panel and type in one word at a time in the small field that says “Click here to add keywords.” To apply the keyword to the photo, you can either hit enter or merely click away from that field.

Editing a Keyword

There’s most likely going to come a time when you make a mistake filling in one or more of your keywords. It sure would be nice to have a way to correct the mistake, or to remove the keyword all together. Luckily, we have a method to accomplish this.

If you look directly above the field I indicated earlier, you’ll see a larger field that holds all of the inputted keywords. If you click right inside that larger field, you should see that the words will become editable. From here, all that needs to be done is what you expect – edit or remove the words.

Adding Multiple Keywords

The really neat thing about Adobe Lightroom is that it’s quite flexible. If you’d like to add multiple keywords, you can do so in either field I’ve already shown (the small or the large). The only thing you need to be aware of is that the keywords need to be comma separated.

Choosing Keywords From a List

This is where all your hard work begins to pay off. After a while, you’ll notice that you’re adding the same keywords over and over again. For instance, I’ve already added the words “Leaves” and “Outdoors” for the two photos I’ve chosen as examples. It’s surely going to get tiresome typing all these repetitive keywords as time goes on.

A quick and easy way to apply already existing keywords to photos is to expand the “Keyword List” panel.

In this panel, you’ll see all existing keywords. To apply one of them to a photo, all you need to do is select the thumbnail and then click the little check box that’s to the right of the keyword itself.

Filtering Photos by Keyword

As if things couldn’t get any cooler, we’re going to get to that point. I now have three example photos in this post that I’ve applied various keywords to. I’ve applied two of those keywords to all three photos. Get this – with just one click of the mouse, I can filter those photos out from all the rest.

In order to filter out keyworded photographs, I’ll need to click on the small white arrow that appears to the right of the keyword in the “Keyword List” panel when I roll over it (the word). Once I roll over the arrow, I’ll see a popup that states “Click to show photos containing this keyword.” If I click the arrow, I’ll find that all other thumbnails and images are removed from my view and only the appropriate thumbnails remain.

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In Adobe Lightroom, collection sets stem from virtually the same idea as folders and sub-folders in your computer operating system do. For example, let’s say that you store all of your photo collections in different folders on your desktop. You’ve got 30 folders, all with different names for different shoots. I think we can all admit that having 30 folders on our desktops would be very confusing to look at and quite the mess. It would be better to organize similar shoots into parent folders to reduce that number. So, if we had a bunch of shoots with animals in them, we could create a parent folder named “Animals” and move all of those shoots in that folder. If we had nature shoots, we could create another folder named “Nature” and do the same thing. We could continue this until there were only a few parent folders on the desktop. Transfer this idea to Lightroom and instead of calling the folders “parents,” call them “sets.”

By the way, if you aren’t familiar with collections in Lightroom, I encourage you to read my posts on them. I covered some really good information:

Targeted & Smart Collections in Adobe Lightroom

How To Create a Collection in Adobe Lightroom

Creating a Collection Set

Before we get organizing, it’s important to understand how to create a collection set. If you already know how to create a collection, you won’t have any difficulty with this.

There are a few methods of creating collection sets. The first is to visit the “Library > New Collection Set” menu item and work from there.

NOTE: If you’d like a larger view of any example image in this post, simply right click on it and choose “Open Image In New Tab.”

The second method is to head down to the “Collections” panel, click the “+” icon and then click on “Create Collection Set.”

Whichever method you choose, you’ll end up with the same “Create Collection Set” dialog box. In my case, since I’m working with some state park photos, I’m going to go ahead and create a collection set named “Nature.” There are various types of nature photographs in my photo shoot.

Once this is done, I’ll see my new set inside of the “Collections” panel.

Moving a Collection into a Collection Set

If you look closely inside of the “Collections” panel in the screenshot above, you’ll notice that there are a few things there. First, we’ve got our new “Nature” collection set. Below that, we’ve got a “Smart Collections” set (that I covered in a previous post) and finally, below that, we’ve got an existing collection called “Flowers.” I believe I create the Flowers collection as part of an example for a previous post as well.

Here’s my goal: I’d like to organize all my nature oriented collections inside my “Nature” collection set. I haven’t created many of them, but since I already have one that’s hanging out in the “Collections” panel, I may as well move that into my “Nature” set. How do I do that? Well, it’s simple. I just drag and drop it as I would any folder on my computer.

Now, if you look inside the “Collections” panel, you’ll see my “Nature” collection set with my “Flowers” collection nested inside of it. I can collapse the set to hide and organize things even further if I wanted to.

Creating a Collection Inside of a Set

Instead of creating a collection and then dragging and dropping it into a collection set, I can simply create a collection into a set to begin with. Again, there are a few methods of completing this. First, you can follow the instructions I gave in this post on how to create a new collection. The only thing you would do differently is when you get to the “Create Collection” dialog box, you would check off the “Inside a Collection Set” box under the “Location” area. From there, you would choose the set you’d like your new collection to reside. I’ll go through this quickly to keep things simple.

During my photo shoot, I took some pictures of the ponds at the park. I’d like to create a collection called “Ponds” and have it automatically be nested under the “Nature” set, right out of the gate. Let’s go through how I would accomplish this.

First, I’d select the photos I want in this collection. I’ll “Ctrl” or “Shift” click on these photos.

In the screenshot above, you can see the highlighted thumbnails I selected. There are six of them.

Next, I’ll head over and click on the “+” icon in the “Collections” panel and click on “Create Collection.”

From there, I’ll see the “Create Collection” dialog box appear. I’ll name my collection “Ponds” and after that, I’ll tick the “Inside a Collection Set” check box. I’ll choose “Nature” as the set I’d like to create this new collection under and click the “Create” button.

Important: notice how the “Include Selected Photos” check box is ticked off.

Finally, we can see the new “Ponds” collection nested inside the “Nature” collection set inside the “Collections” panel.

This collection also contains the pond photos I selected.

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To begin this post, I think it would be helpful to define what both “Targeted” and “Smart” collections are. I’ll be discussing how these types of collections can greatly assist you, organization-wise, while working in Adobe Lightroom, so let’s get some of this housekeeping out of the way.

Targeted Collection: When marking a collection as “Targeted,” you’re essentially making it the working collection. The marking of a targeted collection is with the use of a small “+” symbol that sits to the right of the collection name. The collection is managed with a keyboard shortcut (we’ll cover that below) and when that shortcut is used, any photo selected will automatically move to the targeted collection. It’s basically a faster method of adding and removing photos to and from a specified area.

Smart Collection: A “Smart” collection is one that already exists in Adobe Lightroom. You can see it in the “Collections” panel. This type of collection already has a few sub-folders inside of it and they filter out photos that have been previously rated, marked or labeled. This type of collection transcends folders, meaning the photos that inhabit it (them) can be from anywhere inside a Lightroom catalog.

Targeted Collections

In order to specify a particular collection as Targeted, you merely need to right-click on the collection name in the “Collections” panel and select “Set as Targeted Collection.” Take a look at the screenshot below.

NOTE: If you’d like a larger view of any example image in this post, simply right click on it and choose “Open Image In New Tab.”

Once I make that selection, the small “+” symbol will appear, as I mentioned above.

Let’s say that I’d like to begin adding some photos to this targeted collection. To do so, all I’d need to do is to select the desired thumbnail or thumbnails and either hit the “B” key on my keyboard or head up to and click on the “Photo > Add to Targeted Collection” menu item.

Once that’s finished, my photo will be included in that particular collection. In my case, it’s the one I named “Flowers.” Let’s take a look.

To remove any photo from this collection, all I need to do is follow the same instructions I gave above. From inside the collection or inside the originating thumbnail area, I can select the photos in question and either click “B” on my keyboard or use the “Photo” menu up top. They both accomplish the same task.

I think the primary reason folks use this feature in Lightroom is to speed up their work process. If you’ve got tons of photos, you can simply round up the ones you want and click a keyboard shortcut to place them somewhere. It’s much quicker than clicking and dragging.

Smart Collections

Personally, I prefer using Smart collections over Targeted collections. If I’ve already done all my rating and labeling, in my mind, I’ve already done the filtering labor. This may be simply because of how I work and what I do, but I really do find these types of collections handy. Just remember though, Smart collections affect your entire catalog, not just one or two folders inside of it.

Let’s take a look at the folders inside of the Smart collections area.

As you can see, there are some pre-existing folders inside of it. Right now, we’ve got “Colored Red,” “Five Stars,” “Past Month,” “Recently Modified,” “Video Files” and “Without Keywords.”

Now, if I click on the “Five Stars” Smart collection, I’ll see all the photos that I’ve rated as five stars. The photos currently in this collection just happen to be from one folder, but if I had other photos with this particular rating in other folders, they would be in this collection as well.

Here’s the thing – and you may have already noticed this – the pre-existing collections inside the “Smart” collections panel may not be to our liking. What if I wanted to filter out four star ratings? Or a color other than red? Or a bunch of other things? Well, it’s really easy to set up more sub-smart collections. To do so, simply click the “+” symbol to the right of the “Collections” panel label and choose “Create Smart Collection.”

Once this is done, you should see a nice informative dialog box appear. It gives all sorts of options to create the collections of your liking.

In the above screenshot, you can see that I already created a new collection. I also left the collection type drop-down box pulled down, so you can see all the choices available. Just remember to name the collection up top or else you’ll have another collection called “Smart Collection.”

If you aren’t aware, I wrote a previous post that deals with the many functions of collections inside Adobe Lightroom. If you’re interested in reading that post and learning more, you can check if out here.

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If you’ve enjoyed today’s post and found it helpful, please share it with a friend. Also, if you’d like to continue learning and would like our posts sent directly to your email inbox, simply sign up for our newsletter. We’ll send each and every post directly to you. Thanks!