Are You Making Full Use of the View Modes in Lightroom?

With Lightroom's new update being the main recent talking point among Adobe photography users, it still might be worth checking out some of the fundamentals of the powerful application. Here's a video detailing the four main view modes besides the Grid view in the Library module — with a bonus explanation of metadata filters at the end.

In this video, food photographer and educator Brandon Figueroa takes us through the various view modes, explaining how we can use them for our own workflow. Everyone has their own ways of doing things in Lightroom's Library module, and a lot of how you choose to use it depends on what you use it for and possibly the volume of images you're processing. It might seem like a very basic video aimed at beginners, however — I'm a little embarrassed to say — I didn't even know that Survey view was even a thing, and if I had known about it, I definitely would have utilized it already. 

I shoot a lot of interiors, so, for my own workflow, being able to compare wide-angle shots to detail shots of the same room so easily — photographed at different times, so they don't appear next to each other in the Library —  could very well speed up my process. Yes, there are workarounds like starring, flagging, or coloring, but with a large house, this can be a tedious process. The same can be said of the Compare and Reference views. I would need to see several photos together on the page, so while those views are certainly helpful in my situation, they don't completely fulfill my needs.

Did you learn anything new from the video?

Mike O'Leary's picture

Mike is a landscape and commercial photographer from, Co. Kerry, Ireland. In his photographic work, Mike tries to avoid conveying his sense of existential dread, while at the same time writing about his sense of existential dread. The last time he was in New York he was mugged, and he insists on telling that to every person he meets.

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2 Comments

It's called "loupe view" because back in the days of film you would use a magnifying device called a "loupe" to view individual frames on a strip of film.

Boy, this was one great video covering really useful stuff I thought I would love to be able to do but felt would be to to hard for me to understand. Thanks