30. SYNCHRONIZING YOUR SETTINGS WITH OTHER IMAGES
LIGHTROOM MAKES IT very easy for you to make adjustments to your picture with sliders, and it’s pretty straightforward. However, you’re not going to be working on just one picture; you’re going to work on a ton of pictures, and you don’t want to have to go through every single picture to make the same changes.
Fortunately, there’s an easy way for you to take advantage of the changes you’ve made to one picture and copy those changes to all of the other pictures in your shoot by using the sync settings.
I made a bunch of changes to the picture of my friend Destiny shown in Figure 30.1, and I’ve got it exactly where I need it. But this is one of about 100 pictures that I shot, and I would like to apply this effect to all of them. First, I’ll hit the letter G to go back into Grid View mode.
In Grid View mode, you can see that the picture is selected and I have flagged it with red so that it’s easier to see (Figure 30.2). You can do this by pressing the number 6 on your keyboard. Now that I know this is the source picture, I can Shift-click to select a series of pictures, or Command-click (Mac) or Control-click (PC) to select a noncontiguous group of pictures, to which I want to apply the same changes (Figure 30.3).
Once I’ve selected the group of images, I’ll move back into the Develop module. In the Develop module, the primary picture is still selected, but if you look below the image, you will notice that all of the other shots I selected in the Grid View are selected in the filmstrip as well (Figure 30.4).
Now I can press the Sync button in the lower-right corner of the Develop module to open the Synchronize Settings dialog (Figure 30.5). This allows me to decide which of the sliders in the Develop module I would like to include as part of the sync process. At this point, all I have to do is select the ones that I adjusted.
When you’re selecting the sync settings, keep in mind that Process Version is almost always going to be needed when you want to select a different picture in the series. This has to do with how Adobe processes the RAW file. If you deselect this option, you’re going to get a warning. I recommend you always leave that on.
After selecting all of the sliders that I worked with, I’ll go ahead and hit the Synchronize button. As Lightroom syncs the selected images, I can hit the letter G to go back into the Grid View mode and watch as all of the images I selected receive the changes I applied to my source picture. This is a huge time saver.
Now I’ll select one of the pictures to which I copied the changes and hit the letter N to go into survey mode (Figure 30.6). This allows me to see side-by-side that the effects I applied to the source image have been successfully applied to the other image, saving me a ton of time.
Figure 30.1 The amazing Destiny Shami!
Figure 30.2 I flagged my source picture with red so that it’s easy to find in the Grid View mode.
Figure 30.3 I selected multiple images to which I want to apply the changes I made to my source picture.
Figure 30.4 The images I selected in the Grid View are still in selected in the filmstrip.
Figure 30.5 The Synchronize Settings dialog. I recommend always leaving Process Version selected.
Figure 30.6 I successfully copied the settings from my source image and applied them to the other images I selected.