Can Lightroom sync a single HSL slider, like green saturation or blue luminance, across multiple photos?
Asked 2/8/2018
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In Lightroom, I want to copy only one specific HSL adjustment between images—for example just Green Saturation or only Blue Luminance—without syncing the rest of the HSL panel or other develop settings. Is there a native way to do this, or any practical workaround?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
8y ago
2 Answers
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There's no native way that I'm aware of to do this type of syncing retroactively (i.e. via the Sync Settings dialog). It is, however, possible to Auto-Sync or batch apply adjustments to accomplish the same thing. These kinds of adjustments can potentially fall into two categories: absolute and relative.
Absolute Adjustments
For absolute adjustments (i.e., you want every photo to have the same numerical value for that particular adjustment slider):
- Select all of the photos that you want to batch-adjust.
- Go to the Develop pane.
- Auto Sync will only sync changed values. If your primary selected image already has the adjustment that you wish to sync, either select one that doesn't, or enter a dummy value. (If you forget the original value, you can just look at the history panel on the left).
- Turn on Auto Sync.
- Type in the adjustment that you wish to sync. The previews often will not update immediately, but your adjustment will have been synced to all of the selected photos.
Relative Adjustments
For relative adjustments (i.e., you have already adjusted some photos manually, but now want to apply a constant offset to a setting), there's no way that I'm aware of other than hooking into the API. I have an install of VSCO Keys (which has been freeware for quite some time) that does this. You just select the photos that you want to batch-adjust, then hit the corresponding adjustment hotkey while Keys is activated. This is generally not what you want because it's easy to produce inconsistent results that are annoying to undo, but I still do use this a fair bit for bulk offsetting white balance adjustments across a few dozen photos at once. Some caveats on this:
- If you have a lot (20+) of images selected, it will lock up Lightroom for up to several minutes. In the worst case, this can lead to crashes and catalog corruption. I would strongly advise making a catalog backup immediately before doing this method on any kind of a wide scale.
- Lightroom treats each adjusted image in a batch as a separate change when using Keys, so this will quickly saturate the history cache. Read: CTRL+Z will not save you. This is yet another reason to work in manageable batches. If you mess up on a larger selection, you need to apply the opposite correction via VSCO Keys, because CTRL+Z will not undo sufficient steps to revert all the photos, and there's no Lightroom command for "step back a single step in the develop history" that can be auto-synced as far as I'm aware (though there very well may be a VSCO Keys binding available for that). You can of course go through and manually edit the history of each photo, but that rapidly becomes unscalable. This is yet another reason to have an up-to-date catalog backup prior to doing this on a large scale.
You can also likely accomplish relative adjustment sync via other LR plugins, but I'm not aware of any free ones that do this particular operation via a dialog. Here is at least one paid option that I haven't tried. You can also accomplish these API hooks via MIDI2LR, which is more complex than VSCO Keys, but is better supported these days.
Originally by user104419. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user104419
4y ago
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Lightroom doesn’t offer a normal retroactive Sync Settings option for individual HSL color-channel sliders only. In practice, the workable native method is to use batch editing with Auto Sync for absolute adjustments.
If you want all selected photos to end up with the same exact slider value, select the images, go to Develop, enable Auto Sync, then change only the specific HSL slider you want (such as Green Saturation or Blue Luminance). That change is applied across the selection. If the active photo already has that value, briefly move the slider first so Lightroom registers a new change.
A more advanced workaround is writing develop settings to XMP, editing the relevant HSL field in those XMP files (for example the GreenSaturation entry), then having Lightroom read the metadata back in. That can work for batch changes, but it’s manual and not as convenient.
So: no straightforward native “sync just one existing HSL slider after the fact” dialog option, but yes, you can effectively do it with Auto Sync or by editing XMP metadata.
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