Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2

The Quick Develop panel’s sole purpose in life is to speed up your workflow. It is essentially a mini Develop module built right into the Library module. It is not intended to replace the Develop module, but rather to give you the ability to tap into the power of the Develop module while we are making that first pass of edits in the Library module.

For example, imagine you’ve just imported all the photos from a shoot and are in the process of weeding out the keepers from the clunkers. You find a few shots that are composed well, focus is sharp, but a little over (or under exposed). You are in decision making mode, not processing mode. Why break your flow by jumping to the Develop module to see if these are worth saving when you can expand the Quick Develop panel and give the exposure setting enough of a tweak (in either direction) to inform your decision? Perhaps you have a Develop preset that you forgot to apply during import or your in-camera white balance setting was wrong, well with just a few clicks you can apply it to an entire folder right from Grid view. This isn’t finished processing, but rather a quicker way to get to a better starting point.

Let’s expand the panel and see what is there.

There are 3 main sections of controls—Saved Preset, White Balance and Tone Control—and a Reset All button. Clicking the small left-facing black arrow can expand each section further.

The Saved Preset section provides access to all your Develop presets. Unfortunately, they will appear in one long list absent the folder structure you may have created in the Develop module’s Preset panel, so if you have a lot of presets this will be a very long list. In addition, you can apply a new crop ratio to a batch of selected photos while in Grid view or use Treatment to switch between color and grayscale.

The White Balance section provides access to the various white balance presets as well as separate Temperature and Tint adjustment sliders.

The Tone Control provides all the rest of the adjustments found in the Basic panel of the Develop module. Tip: Hold the Alt key on Windows or Option key on Mac to change the Clarity and Vibrance adjustments to Sharpening and Saturation respectively.

The adjustments provided by all the sliders are rather broad strokes compared to the controls in the Develop module. Clicking the double-arrow produces an adjustment in greater increments than clicking the single arrow. For example, the single arrow Exposure adjustment results in a 1/3 stop adjustment while the double-arrow equals a full stop adjustment.

A very important difference in how these adjustments work compared to the Develop module is that these are relative adjustments as opposed to absolute adjustments. This means that if you select multiple images in Grid view and increase Exposure by a single arrow click all photos will have their individual exposure settings boosted by 1/3 stop over whatever exposure setting they already had. However, if you had the same photos selected in Develop with Auto Sync enabled and you increased the Exposure slider by the same amount you would instead be changing all selected photos to the exact same exposure setting.

The Reset All button will revert all selected photos back to the import state.

You can use the Quick Develop panel controls in all views of the Library module, but you can only apply batch settings to groups of photos while in Grid view. If you have multiple photos selected in any of the other view modes you will only affect the most selected (active) photo.

One last aspect to keep in mind is that when you work in the Library module you are seeing previews that may not be rendered as accurately as they are in Develop. So, if you want the truest preview you should always press D to jump to Develop and zoom to 1:1 view. When finished, press E to jump back to Loupe view or G to Grid view and return to the Library module.