Free Photoshop Tutorials: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom – Simple editing actions II.

1. Everybody
It takes a long time and tedious work to edit the first piece in the sequence. Yes, it takes quite a few minutes, and the problem is that the same should be done to the rest of the pictures as well. If you’re out of luck, you have dozens of photos of the same type.

2. Copy of the previous one
Luckily, there’s a button at the bottom of the right-side editing dialog in Develop section, which is a great help in solving this problem. It’s called Previous, its function is to transfer all the settings of the edited photo onto the next one.

So having finished editing the first picture, select the next one and click Previous button. Continue like this until you finish all the pictures. It’s kind of slow to do it one-by-one, but still faster the editing them separately.

Of course it should be emphasized that this button is effective only if the pieces of the sequence needs the same editing. If you have an edited portrait and then a landscape photo, perhaps not the same editing steps are required. Previous does nothing but copies the previous settings.

3. There are more of them
If you work with a really lot of photos and intend to carry out the same editing actions on each of them, you can select all of the pictures by Ctrl+left mouse button click. Then Previous button changes into Sync, i.e. synchronize. It does practically the same things: it tries to unify the look of the selected photos.

There’s a significant difference though. After pressing this button, a separate window with the list of photos to be synchronized pops up, which means you can define which photos should and which ones should not be given the previous editing steps. For example, if you cropped and sharpened the first photo, set the contrast, but you wish to have the latter two changes in the rest of the pictures, then you can omit Crop option in the list.

4. In details
Here’s the dialog mentioned above. The list is quite detailed. Practically all the major settings are to be found here, even the selective editing tools, brushes, or straightening tool.

You can also reach this Settings window if you right click above the photo that was edited first, and then select Settings/Copy Settings in the appearing menu. The same window appears for you to select which editing steps you want to copy from the first photo. If you load a picture afterwards, you can copy the saved steps with the help of Setting/Paste Settings in the same menu.

You will find Paste Settings from Previous (paste settings from the previous photo) and Settings Sync (synchronizing settings) option in the menu.

5. All the same
The result is an equally edited sequence finished in a relatively short time. We just had to devote more time to the first photo.