Lightroom 5: Learning the "Just Do It" Features

The team working on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom has a great attitude towards improving their software. They are passionate about photography, and apart from engaging with their customers, they also use their product daily to see how can they improve it. Apart from the main new features, they always select and implement dozens of smaller refinements and additions that they call "Just Do It" (JDI) features. In this tutorial, I will share with you what I learnt about these features from Lightroom and Camera RAW Product Manager Sharad Mangalick.

It was a great pleasure to be able to talk to Sharad, Lightroom Product Manager and learn about his team's process behind adding JDI features to Lightroom. These are mainly small improvements, but they all increase the usability and effectiveness of Lightroom.

They have a very organic process of implementing these features and everyone gets involved in forming the future of the application. They love to engage with the Lightroom community and do their best to improve the product to satisfy every users' need.

Every month the Lightroom team, where everyone is a passionate photographer, choose a theme that they take pictures of. A theme might be photos of the food they cook. At the end of the month, they compare their photos and use this whole process for exploring Lightroom and issues users might run into when working on their photographs.

At Adobe, everyone’s office is decorated with their creative work and they help each other to improve their photography skills. They are always using the product and scanning for ideas. Customer feedback is greatly appreciated.

In the following video I'm going to show you Sharad's and my top 5 JDI features introduced in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5:

Top Five JDI Features

1. Set as Target Collection

You can set any of your collections as a Target Collection and with Quick Collection's keyboard shortcut, B, you will be able to add photos quickly to them.

2. Full Screen View

No need for pressing lots of different shortcuts to get a full screen view of your photos any more. Simply press F and take look at your photo without any of the panels in the way.

3. Visualize Spots

There is a very useful new view option for the Spot Removal Tool, which allows you to reveal less visible spots on your photos caused by dust in the sensor or the lens.

4. Duplicate Local Adjustments

>Cmd/Ctrl + Option/Alt + drag will duplicate local adjustments made with the Radial Filter, Gradient Filter and the Adjustment Brush.

5. New Shortcut for the Spot Removal Tool

Press Shift + Q to quickly switch between Clone and Heal modes of the Spot Removal Tool.

Full list of all JDIs Introduced in Lightroom 5

Manage

PNG file support
True Full Screen Mode
Configurable grid overlays
Windows HiDPI
Additional criteria for filters and Smart Collections
Lock zoom position preference settings
Keyboard shortcut to trigger tethered capture
Direction field in the EXIF metadata panel
Persistent place in Collections
"Set as Target Collection" checkbox in Create Collection dialogue
Drag Saved Location to a photo in the Map Module
Integrity verification of DNG Files Edit

Edit

LAB color readout
Keyboard shortcut to toggle between Clone and Heal modes
Duplicate local adjustments
Duplicate linear gradients
Aspect slider added to Manual Lens Corrections
Persistent clipping indicators between Lightroom sessions
Crop overlay aspect ratios

Share

Behance Publish Plugin
Visual indicator of favorite book pages
Improved visualization of select book elements
Transparent buttons for improved text creation in Books
More page text metadata options

Take Part in Adding New Features to Lightroom

If you think you have ideas about how to improve Lightroom and make the next version even better feel free to contact the Lightroom team on one of the following forums:

Customers can also connect directly with Sharad Mangalick, Lightroom and Camera RAW Product Manager on Twitter: @smangalick