5 Lightroom Secrets You Should Know

Lightroom Classic hides powerful features in plain sight that can dramatically speed up your editing workflow. Even experienced users regularly miss these tools, leading to slower editing sessions and frustrating workarounds that could be avoided entirely.

Coming to you from Matt Kloskowski, this practical video reveals common Lightroom mistakes that sabotage your editing efficiency across multiple areas of the program. The most critical issue involves the masking interface, where you can accidentally apply global adjustments instead of masked changes. When you create a mask, Lightroom displays both the masking panels and the basic panel simultaneously. Many users unknowingly scroll down to the familiar basic panel controls and make adjustments there, not realizing they're affecting the entire image rather than just the masked area. This simple misunderstanding can waste hours of editing time and create confusing results where your mask overlay remains visible but your adjustments don't seem to work. Kloskowski admits he wishes Adobe would hide the basic panel entirely when masking is active to prevent this confusion.

The video also covers the Previous button, one of Lightroom's most underutilized workflow accelerators that sits quietly in the bottom right corner of the develop module. This button applies all edits from your previously viewed photo to the current image with a single click. When you're working through a series of similar shots, this feature provides an instant starting point rather than rebuilding edits from scratch. Kloskowski demonstrates how this works with landscape photos that share similar lighting and composition, showing how the Previous button can cut editing time dramatically. The key is understanding that "previous" refers to the last photo you actually viewed, not necessarily the photo directly before it in your sequence. This distinction becomes important when you skip photos during your review process.

Another revelation involves Lightroom's interface triangles, small arrows that appear throughout the program to indicate hidden settings. When triangles point left or right, they signal expandable sections with additional controls that many users never discover. Kloskowski shares examples of users missing entire feature sets in areas like point color controls simply because they haven't clicked these triangles to reveal hidden options. The video also addresses the disappearing toolbar problem, where accidentally pressing the "T" key makes the bottom toolbar vanish, leaving users confused about missing controls. 

Perhaps most importantly, Kloskowski advocates for a fundamental shift in editing workflow that challenges traditional approaches to photo processing. Instead of spending most of your time in the basic panel making global adjustments, he suggests moving to masking tools much earlier in your process. With Lightroom's improved AI masking capabilities, including landscape detection and other automated selections, you can now target specific areas of your photos for exposure, color, and tonal adjustments with unprecedented precision. This approach allows for more sophisticated edits while maintaining natural-looking results. The basic panel then becomes a tool for final micro-adjustments rather than the primary editing workspace, representing a complete reversal of traditional Lightroom workflows that many photographers still follow.

That's just the start, so check out the video above for the full rundown from Kloskowski.