This Little Known Lightroom Trick Could Save You Hours

If you find yourself editing photoshoots with hundreds of photos, you know how tedious it can be to adjust the exposure manually on each image so that they all match.

Well as it turns out – Lightroom actually has a tool built to do this automatically! In this video tutorial you’ll learn how to use adjusted exposure to get lightroom to use auto exposure + speed up your batch edits.

Adjusted exposure in Lightroom Classic lets you apply auto exposure to all of your images with one click.

This little Lightroom trick can save you a ton of time when you’re batch editing hundreds of images from a session.

Simply select your images and let Lightroom apply auto exposure instead of manually adjusting each one from scratch.

Lightroom auto exposure in 3 easy steps!

❶ Open the library view in Lightroom Classic

• Go the Catalog panel in the Library module (Keyboard shortcut = G)

❷ Select the photos you want to adjust.

• Click on the top photo you want to select, then hold SHIFT on your keyboard, and click the bottom photo of the group you want to select. This will select all photos in between. To remove selections or add selections elsewhere in your gallery, hold COMMAND (or control on a PC) to make single selections

❸ Navigate to “Match Total Exposures” in your menu

• On a mac, this can be found under PHOTO > DEVELOP SETTINGS > MATCH TOTAL EXPOSURE
• On a PC, it might be in the same place, or else try “Settings” from the top bar in Lightroom, then select “Match Total Exposure” from that drop-down menu.
  

Presto, Lightroom will do it’s best to match the exposures between your highlighted selection and the rest of your selected photos!

While Lightroom auto exposure works a LOT of the time, it’s not perfect and is really most effective when applied to very similar photos vs an entire session. Still, it’s one more tool that can save you time while editing and help you with your photography editing inside Lightroom Classic.