Lightroom Sync Settings

The always amazing CMmentor, Megan Moore, is sharing more of her tips and tricks for Adobe Lightroom here on the blog today.  Today Megan is going over sync settings.  Megan is a teaching assistant in our Processing 101: Lightroom Start-to-Finish workshop and knows her stuff – thanks for sharing with us, Megan!

Lightroom Sync Settings

by Megan Moore

Today I want to talk about one of my favorite Lightroom features: the Sync Settings button.

I love this little button for when I’m doing my Lightroom editing. It speeds up my workflow tremendously, and helps me to ensure that images shot in the same setting will all “match”, in terms of white balance, exposure, and overall processing.

 The Sync Settings button is very easy to use, and requires a minimal amount of set up. We’ll start by opening up a series of images I want to edit. I want to look for a set that is shot in the same location, with generally the same light, and where my settings don’t vary substantially. I find I use this a lot with indoor family sessions, or any session with more than one child involved – I tend to shoot more in both situations, to make sure I’m getting images where everyone’s eyes are open and they’re not making a strange face.

I shot these images today of my son sitting up in a blue chair – the light is pretty much the same for them all, and I didn’t change my settings, so these are a good example to use.

I select the first image, and make my adjustments to it in the Develop Module. Here I just want to brighten the image a little, and take out some red in his skin. I have customized presets I use for my workflow, so I just have to click on the “initial” preset over on the left, and tweak it to my satisfaction.

I want to sync this processing to the other 5 images (see bottom of screen). Not only does this save me editing time, it ensures that all of these images will have the same color, toning, exposure, and other processing. So I go to the bottom, and hold down my shift key, and click on the last image in the set. This selects all the images in between the highlighted one and the last one. If you just wanted to select a couple of images that weren’t next to each other, you would use the command button instead of shift. You’ll see that the button above that says “previous” now says “sync”.

I have almost everything checked in this box. The things I do not want to sync are the local adjustments, spot removal, and crop. I don’t want to sync these unless my composition is almost exactly the same for each image, which it rarely is. Also, I don’t use all of these options in my editing, so I just leave the rest checked with the Lightroom defaults.

Go ahead and synchronize, and watch the magic happen.

That’s it! I may tweak a couple of images to get them just how I want them, but beyond that, I’m done editing in Lightroom and ready to finish up in Photoshop.

And for fun, here’s a finished version of one of the above images. He was slightly hungry during this mini-shoot, in case you can’t tell haha.