2 Quick Keyboard Shortcuts for Photo Editing in Lightroom

Lightroom Tutorials  •  Photo Editing  •  Photography Tips

Ever wished your photo editing could be more efficient? Here are two quick keyboard shortcuts to use in Adobe Lightroom, guaranteed to speed up your post-processing to check for problems in highlights and shadows:

Hosted by Arizona-based wedding photographer Trevor Dayley, this quick video introduces two hot keys—J and backslash (\).

Hitting the letter J highlights blown-out areas in red, indicating which areas are pure white—meaning there’s no visible detail, because the highlights are too strong. (Bring down the exposure and you can see the opposite—pure blacks highlighted blue.)

After you adjust your highlights and shadows, you can hit the backslash key to show how your image looked before your edits. Hit backslash again to revert them. That’s a quick way to see if you’re on the right track, and that your edits haven’t made the image any worse or distorted the colors at all.

Using these two keys makes for a quick and easy way to edit your images for brightness and contrast. You may be a pro at post-processing, but efficiency is what separates professionals from beginners.