Using the Painter Tool in Lightroom Classic

One of my favorite tools in Lightroom Classic is the Painter tool. For those of you not familiar with it, the Painter tool allows you to pick an attribute (including keyword, label, flag, ratings, metadata templates, settings (presets+), rotation and target collection) and apply to images by clicking on the image thumbnail in the Grid view. The primary benefit of using the Painter tool is that you don’t have to first select the image – you simply click on the image to apply the attribute. In fact, you can click -drag across multiple thumbnails to “spray-on”  the attribute! Here are three examples of when I find the Painter tool to be really efficient:

When applying star ratings (or labels or flags) in Grid view. 

When adding images to a Target Collection.

When applying Presets to images.

In the Quick Tip below, I walk through two examples of using the Painter tool in Lightroom.

And here are some of my favorite Painter Tool shortcuts:

• Command + Option (Mac) / Control + Alt (Win) + K will enable the painting tool in the Library module. 
• Option -click(Mac) | Alt -click (Win)  with the Painter tool will remove the information.
• When finished, tapping the Escape key will put the tool away.
• After loading the Painter tool with a keyword, Shift + K will assign the keyword to the selected image(s). 

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