Lightroom is designed to befast, and while the user interface is pretty quick, there’s still another way to make those edits faster: the keyboard. But there’s a problem. Adobe’s list of Lightroom shortcuts is somewhere in the ballpark of 300 combinations – pretty impressive for a laptop’s 80-some keys.
Unless you use a keyboard skin or you have a photographic memory, you’re probably not going to be whizzing through your edits using every memorized hot key anytime soon. Thankfully, several of the most helpful keyboard shortcuts aren’t too difficult to remember. After you’vemastered the basics of Lightroom, memorize these 18 most-often used Lightroom shortcuts — and note that we’ve provided an easy way to remember them.
Lightroom shortcuts for organizing and flagging photos
Shortcuts don’t really handle complicated things likeadding presets in Lightroom. They’re more of an organizational feature to help you manage your albums.
Many photographers who start with digital shoot many more photos then they actually need (I’m so guilty of this that my first newsroom editor nicknamed me Pepper). Keyboard shortcuts make quick work of picking out the best shots. Most users know that you canuse the arrow keys to navigate to the next image and the backspace or delete key to remove photos, but there are a number of other commands that are (almost) as easy to remember.
7 – Yellow
One more handy trick —Hold down shift to move to the next photoafter marking, this trick works for flagging, star ratings, color labels and rejecting a photo.
Lightroom shortcuts for editing photos
Keyboard shortcuts can make quick work of sorting through photos, and while you likely can’t do all of your edits with keyboard commands, they still can help speed up the process. Keyboard shortcuts are handy for selecting and even adjusting tools.
] – Larger
Tip:On touchpad laptops, you can swipe two fingers up or down to adjust the brush size in Lightroom.
Not bad for even the memory challenged, right? Keyboard shortcuts are a simple way to cut back on editing time without purchasing an additional set of physical controls — you can even sort, flag and tag entire catalogs with just a lift of the finger. They work in bothAdobe Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic.
If you’re feeling brave, you can findthe entire set of Lightroom hotkeys here.
