Free Image Editor

To optimize your editing workflow to help make editing photos in lightroom faster, one thing we always recommend if you have a large batch of photos usually anything over 50 photos or more is to cull your photos in another application so instead of just importing every single photo that you shot into lightroom you're only importing the selects that you want to edit and then potentially deliver to a client or just have for yourself the benefit of doing it this way is other apps are just faster at loading the jpeg previews of raw photos and that makes the culling process so much faster than doing it in something like lightroom so two apps you can try out are photo mechanic and optics optics was actually developed by my cousin patrick you're my cousin aren't you.

We have the wheel which has a touch screen on the front where you can toggle through different adjustments and then turn the wheel to make that adjustment it's honestly really freaking cool and it also integrates with other programs like photoshop premiere final cut and even ableton live so if you have a wide array of creative interests you can use the loop deck to have that tactile customized control i even set up a custom workspace for when i'm day trading with one press of the loop deck i can make a trade so yeah i've been having some fun with that click the link in the description to learn more about loop deck now excuse me while i edit some photos.

Once you're editing away in the develop module don't forget about the synchronized settings function we did this earlier in the library module but we can also do it here so if you went in and added a graduated filter to lower the exposure over part of your image you may want to apply that to similar photos again select the photo that has the correct edits and then hold shift and click on the last photo of the batch that you want to adjust and then just click sync one.

Other similar function i use is the previous button this will apply the exact same settings that were on the previous photo you were editing this is a super quick way to edit when you have shots with similar subject matter and camera settings just spend the time to get the first photo right and then instantly apply those edits anywhere else you want i use this all the time there are certain parameters in lightroom that use up more of your computer's resources than others so it might make sense for you to apply these settings at the very end right before you export noise reduction sharpening and lens corrections tend to be resource intensive adjustments now we use lens corrections all the time and we usually apply it early on into the edit because it can affect the overall exposure of the image but if you really are trying to speed things up at all costs consider waiting until the end one of the easiest ways to do this is go to the first image in your catalog apply any noise reduction sharpening lens corrections and even grain.

If you'd like then scroll to the end of the catalog shift click and then synchronize just make sure you only select the settings you just made adjustments on and nothing else then click synchronize now you can feel free to export believe it or not simply closing the histogram panel has a pretty significant difference in increasing the speed of lightroom just switching between photos with the histogram open versus the histogram being closed should be enough to convince you to keep it closed if you don't find yourself using it very often of course feel free to pop it open when you need to but otherwise keeping it close can really help things run smoother call in a program like optics or photo mechanic store your catalog and cache on a fast drive optimize lightroom settings like cache size and xmp writing build smart previews use library mode to make batch edits create presets for common settings like tone curve and calibration use a loop deck ct sync settings apply noise reduction sharpening and lens corrections at the end close the histogram panel.