Looking to find out the settings you’ve applied to an image in Lightroom? Sometimes we forget and want to remember how we got that perfect look for our image. I’ve got a really quick tip for you today that will help you do just that.

To do that, we use the History panel in the Develop module. Go ahead and open it by clicking on the word “history” if it’s not already visible.

Now, it’s clear the settings that we’ve applied to a given image. Let me walk you through how I modified this image:

• I created a Virtual Copy to work with a separate edit of the image.
• I applied a preset that I call bw that gives my images a black and white effect
• I added +1.0 stops of exposure to brighten the photo up
• I played with the whites setting, bringing it down by a value of 43
• I added a post crop vignette, with a value of -12

Using this history panel, it’s so easy to find out how we treated an image, and presumably make notes about how to achieve the same look with other images. This is also a great time to build a preset! (Hint, hint.)

Every step of our photo editing process is important., but there’s something essential about culling. Culling, the process of cutting down our shoot to our “keeper images” is where big decisions get made about which images will make the cut.

The problem with culling is that it’s time consuming. It takes serious time – and energy (in the form of decision making) to get our keepers cut down. Today, I’ve got five of my favorite tips for how to expedite this process.

1) Do it all at once.

After I throw a series of images into Lightroom, the first thing I do is cull in the Library module. Period, no questions asked. I won’t do any editing (Develop module) work until I have my images narrowed down to exactly what I need post-culling process.

Before adopting the “all at once” approach, I spent too much time jumping around in Lightroom. I might cull for an hour, edit those photos, export etc. Terrible approach – knock out all of your culling all at once.

2) Build a system.

Photographers have all types of systems for culling their images. Some use flags to mark keepers, others use color labels, and still others like to use the star system. Whatever route you want to take, make a choice and stick with it! The more that you can learn your routine, the more you can reproduce it. Routine helps us keep our creative thoughts organized.

Filter by color label is one system photographers use to cull.

3) Use the keyboard.

I can’t say enough about the power of the keyboard shortcuts that I’m always talking about. You don’t realize how much time you lose by moving your hand back and forth to the mouse. A quick refresher on a few keyboard shortcuts:

• Flag: P to mark as a pick, U to unflag a photo
• Color labels: use the keyboard numbers 6, 7, 8, and 9 to apply color lables
• Star ratings: use the keyboard numbers 1-5 to apply star ratings

When it comes to culling, I think that using the keyboard is the only way to go. Here’s a quick tip for you, free of charge! When culling, make sure Caps Lock is on on your keyboard. This auto-advances you to the next photo to mark it is a pick, give it a color label, etc.

4) Be confident.

This might sound like a silly tip, but this is one thing that I used to miss out on. I would deliberate or agonize over “should I keep this one or the one right after it?” and find myself taking forever to finish culling.

We’re digital these days. If I find that I’m missing a photo in my the editing stage, I simply switch back and add that photo to my selections. Do we want to get the cull right the first time? Absolutely. But we aren’t dealing with life or death, one time opportunity type work here.

5) Enjoy it!

This might not make it faster, but it will certainly make the time pass more rapidly. Culling is rarely mentally-intensive work, so I almost always have something going in the background. A good episode of SVU on Netflix or one of my favorite stations on Pandora has set the stage for lots of long nights of getting my favorite photos picked for Development.

What are your favorite culling tips? What challenges you to get your work done?

A reader recently wrote into me with the following message:

I love the blog. I’m learning so much about how to use Lightroom. I can follow all of the guides, but my photo life is still a mess. I know how to do things, but not how to use them on my own images.

The truth is that I can only dole out so much advice. As you’ll often see me write in my posts, I will give you advice based on how my workflow works. There’s a problem with that though.

I don’t shoot like you. I shoot different things, with different cameras and onto different computer systems. If you try to copy me, it won’t work as well for you. It’s not because my workflow is great (it’s certainly not), it’s because the core worth of the workflow is that it meets our needs as a shooter.

I can only do so much to provide help. I used to be like you – I would follow tutorials and guides to a “T”. And yet, it didn’t help me to solve my problems or increase my creative work. The issue is that I was so busy trying to imitate others, that I didn’t innovate on my own work.

The issue is that I was so busy trying to imitate others, that I didn’t innovate in my own work.

I hope you will explore the site and take a look at the advice I offer, as well as the way that I recommend doing things. But you’re going to have to work with your own images to get the hang of how to apply all of your knowledge. Make Lightroom work for you.

I won’t ever claim that anything I do is the best way to do something. I create solutions to my own issues. My posts, I think, are a good mix of how to do things and why to do them. If you understand the techniques and steps to take to accomplish things, you might begin to understand how you can apply them to your own image needs.

With all of that said, I’m always available for help. Check in in the comments or shoot me an email on the contact page so we can help you do what you do.

Cropping is so important because it can really improve our composition, and we all know about the importance of composition. One of these days, I’ll fill your head with composition ideas, but this is the 10 Minute Guide. 😀 That’s right, in about 10 minutes, we’ll make sure that you can get started with good cropping in Lightroom.

Someday, we’ll take a little closer look at some of the advanced ways to crop photos in Lightroom. But today, we’re taking a look at how to get started with cropping photos in Lightroom in a quick way.

Okay, to get started, let’s make sure that you’re in the Develop module. You can click Develop on the list of modules (upper right hand corner of Lightroom) to enter it, or press D to enter it as well.

Entering the Develop module lets us get started with cropping.

Next, go ahead and pick out the image that you want to work with. To get started with cropping, Press R on the keyboard, or press the crop button (far left) just under the histogram.

Now, we’re ready to get started. You’ll see that a grid has appeared on top of your images, and this is the basis for all cropping.

I’ll make a recommendation here: go ahead and press the lock button on the options on the right side. This will keep the dimensions of the photo locked so that we don’t create funky crops. It will basically keep the image the same “shape” as how it comes out of camera. If you want to create

Clicking the padlock locks the aspect ratio.

Okay, now that that’s taken care of, here’s my recommended way of cropping:

1) Grab a control handle of the photo. These are the thick lines that are at the corners and in the middle at top and bottom. You’ll see your cursor change, and dragging makes the rectangle smaller in area.

2) After you’ve made a smaller box, just drag the box to the area that you want to keep.

After making a smaller box, I just drag the new smaller area to the “keeper” area”. Anything in darker gray is going to be cropped out.

After you’ve done that, just press R on the keyboard again to leave crop mode and you’ll find your new crop!

Just two steps: resize a smaller area, and drag it to the part we want to keep

Another method is to just draw the rectangle over the area of the photo you want to crop to by clicking and dragging the box. If you want to “start from scratch” with the crop, that’s the best way of doing it.

So there you have it – you’ve got a really quick and easy crop method! I can do most crops in under 10 seconds after mastering the tool.

Did I explain this clearly? This is fairly easy to do, but a little tough to get started with. If you need more help, check in with a comment and I can explain more. 😀

This post is aimed at users who have never used Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. If you’re wondering if you should upgrade from Lightroom 3, check out this post.

If you’ve taken notice of this site’s name, you can probably get a good idea of what my answer to the question is. But my path to using Lightroom might surprise you.

When I first used Adobe Lightroom, I hated it. I had buyer’s remorse about buying it. I hated the complexity of it, as well as

The problem wasn’t the program. The problem was how I used it.

I’m reminded of a quote a favorite teacher shared with me about how best to attack big problems (or in this case, big programs):

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. 

Attempting to jump into Lightroom and bite it off all at once is not going to end well. Instead, approach Lightroom seeking to solve your problems. As I’ve said before, each of the modules is really a solution.

If you’re serious about taming your image collection, learning Lightroom is the best investment of your time. In my opinion, there are no other applications that come close to rivaling the power of Adobe’s photo management software.