One of my many resolutions for 2015 is to get to grips with Adobe’s Creative Cloud. Since Apple announced the demise of Aperture last year, I was thrown into the deep end of Lightroom in mid year. I had dallied even before Apple’s surprise decision, but I knew in July that I had to get to grips with Lightroom and, eventually, other members of the Adobe suite of applications.
I’m progressing well with Lightroom and a crash course in Photoshop. Both these applications benefit from a knowledge of quick key combinations if you are to get the best out of them. And this is one area I have been lacking in Lightroom. Initially, as we all do, we tend to concentrate on pull-down menus and it is only when we get really familiar with a product that we start thinking about learning the shortcuts.
Fortunately there is an excellent guide to key Creative Cloud combinations (for Mac, Windows and Linux) available from GitHub. It’s an on-line system which means you have all your help at your finger tips wherever you happen to be. The above example layout is the global context map for Lightroom on the Mac but, as you see from the pull-down list, you can customise the keyboard map for individual modules in either Lightroom or Photoshop. There is a wide choice of keyboard languages and layouts (including US and UK English) so make things as easy as possible.
While these keyboard maps won’t teach you Lightroom or Photoshop (there are excellent video tutorials for this on YouTube and elsewhere), they will certainly make life easier once you have grasped the basics.