Five Lightroom Keyboard Shortcuts You Need to Know

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, like all Adobe products, is full of awesome little keyboard shortcuts. The trouble is, you need to learn them if you want to be at all efficient at what you're doing. You can get by just clicking around the screen to do everything... but some things will take a lot longer if you don't know the appropriate keyboard shortcut.

So, here are my top five keyboard shortcuts. Memorize these and see if you don't get better and more efficient at using Lightroom.

Flagging Photos. Press the tilde key (`) to give a photo a flag. Press it a second time to toggle the flag off. Press the 'X' key to reject a photo and give it a black flag. This is a boon for organizing your photos, and it is a key part of my Lightroom organizational workflow.

Rating Photos. You can give a photo a rating from one to five stars by pressing the appropriate number key (1, 2, 3, 4, or 5). You can use either the keys on top of the keyboard or the numpad. If you'd like to remove a rating, press the 0 key. As with flagging, this is an integral part of my organizational workflow and I use these shortcuts extensively after importing new pictures.

Instant Cropping. Although I don't usually edit photos as part of my organizational workflow, I do often crop them. This, more than little exposure adjustments, helps me decide if an image is worth keeping or not. If you press the "R" key, it will instantly switch Lightroom to the Develop module and open up the Crop Overlay. After you're done adjusting the crop overlay, you can press the "R" button again to accept the changes. The only annoying part about this is that it won't return you to the library module if that's where you were.

Change the Tool to Zoom. If you're working on re-touching a portrait in Lightroom, then you're going to be working with tools. For example, you might have the Spot Removal tool out, and your mouse cursor will be a spot remover instead of a zoom tool. Press and hold the space bar, and your cursor will temporarily return to a zoom tool. This lets you quickly zoom in and out on a picture - excellent for working on different parts of a subject with a spot removal tool or an adjustment brush.

Hide Everything. The last short-cut is perfect for viewing the final picture to assess your editing work. Press Shift and Tab to hide the side, top, and bottom panels. This greatly increases the size of the picture, allowing you or someone else to better appreciate the final product. For maximum effect, you can also tap the "F" key twice to get to Full Screen mode and tap the "L" key twice to get to Lights Out mode.

There are plenty of other shortcuts that I use on any given day, but I'd have to say these are my top five. Can't live without 'em.