I have to admit that until recently I was not much of a fan of the Quick Develop panel in the Library module. I figured, what the heck if I want to develop an image I will go to the Develop module.
Recently I have started to see the light though. Since all the editing is non-destructive anyway, why not for instance have a quick look at the image in Grayscale, and just as quickly change back to Color.
The quick develop panel is sort of like using a Polaroid on a film camera used to be, only instead of checking the lighting and exposure before committing to film, you are checking your developing intentions before making the move to the Develop module and bringing out all the heavy tools.
No matter what you do the Reset button always allows you to start over from the Default Setting anyway, so I use the Reset button a lot to start over from scratch, it makes it very easy not to worry about overdoing it with any setting.
Individual settings are just as easy to reset, by just clicking on the name of the setting. For example if you have overdone it on the Fill Light setting, just click on the word Fill Light.
The Synch Settings button is also very useful in that it allows you to transfer the settings of one image to a large group of images, and like all Develop or Quick Develop tools it is a completely non-destructive action and can be reversed at any time.
So have fun with the Quick Develop tools, you can’t do any permanent damage, no matter how hard you try.
I find it very annoying that lightroom immediately starts to "quick develop" my RAWs the moment they are imported from my camera. I want to look at them in the raw before I go to the develop module and NOT have to select zero'd every goddamn time! Is there really not a work-around for this?
Thanks for the tip, looks pretty cool. I will be sure to check it out.
Love your column btw... :-)
I think you're still missing the point of the tool a little. You can Sync in Develop, or use its AutoSync mode.
QD has 2 putposes - (1) making adjustments to large numbers of images quickly using only cached data (so not loading all the bytes like in Develop and getting lots of pics close to their final state), and (2) during the evaluation phase when you need to make quick adjustments so that a fair comparisons can be made within a series of eg bracketed shots.
I didn't like it at first, but it does have value.