Lightroom 5 Tricks
Cropping and Spot Removal
- Cropping is one of those tasks most commonly required by most of us in post-processing our images.Sometimes we want to transform a ‘landscape’, horizontal image into a ‘portrait’, vertical composition. The old way of dragging a corner of the image until we hit the position where the change would occur has now received a new, easier alternative. Simply tap the ‘x’ key on your keyboard and the horizontal framing will change to vertical, and vice versa.
- Spot removal is very often required as our camera sensors acquire dust spots in various field conditions.Lightroom 5 has a few very useful timesaving features for dealing with spots you wish to remove.
- In Develop mode, with the spot removal brush selected, look down at the tool bar near the bottom of the screen. There you will find a ‘Visualize Spots’ checkbox and intensity slider. Select it and see the spots highlighted for your easy removal.
- To make sure every part of the image is checked for spots use the navigation tool to select the top left-hand corner of the image. Now use the ‘page down’ key (Mac: fn + down arrow) to move to the next portion of the image. As you continue to tap this key you will move down the image, automatically move to the top of the next column, and gradually cover every portion of the image, missing nothing.
- You can batch-fix spots in images taken in similar circumstances that produced similar spots. Fix up one image. Choose ‘copy’ from left end of toolbar. In the dialogue screen, deselect all, then check ‘Process Version’ and ‘Spot Removal’. Select the rest of your images, then ‘Paste’. All the same spots will be removed from all the selected images.
Enjoy