Duplicating the previous adjustment

Sometimes the quickest way to apply a good adjustment to an image is to simply duplicate the adjustment you had made previously. In this case, for example, I have an image of a bald eagle, and I'm going to adjust it a little bit to improve its appearance. And I'm going to pretend that I don't realize there''s another similar bald eagle photographed under the exact same conditions, that is the very next image I'm going to see. Of course, I'm only pretending to not notice this, so that you can see the benefit of being able to copy a previous adjustment. I'll go ahead and go back to my first image, and it looks like it's a little bit too magenta, so I'm going to shift the Tint a little bit toward green to try and improve that. Maybe I'll warm up the image, just a little bit, not too much but take the Temperature over a little more towards yellow.

I'm also going to check the Exposure here, I'll hold the Alt Key on Windows or Option Key on Macintosh while increasing the Exposure value. And then I'll tone it down just a little bit so that we don't wash out any detail in the whites, and I think I'll leave Contrast as it is. I want to take a look at the shadows though, maybe opening up some shadow detail, yes, that actually looks like it'll help improve the image a little bit. I'm also going to boost the Vibrance to bring up a little bit more color, and maybe add a little bit of Clarity just to give that perceived sharpness effectively.

And we'll assume that that's a pretty good adjustment but you can see that that means that that first image looks quite a bit different from this second image. So, now when I switch to this next image, I might be thinking I sure wish I had known this image was there, because then I could have applied the same adjustments to both images at the same time. Never fear though, we can still apply the previous adjustment to this image very, very easily. In fact, we can do it in one click. So, now that I've applied adjustments to the first image, I'll go to my second image and simply click the Previous button at the bottom of the right panel in the Develop Module.

That will apply the previously applied adjustments to this image as well. So, you can see all of the adjustments that I had applied to the previous image are duplicated for this image. I might want to fine tune some of those adjustments, for example, I'll evaluate the Exposure. And actually that looks like it was working just fine as it was, but I can continue fine tuning any of these adjustments as I see fit. But at the very least, I've gotten a good starting point by duplicating the adjustment that I applied to the previous image to this image. And bear in mind, by the way, that by previous, it doesn't necessarily mean the previous image on the Filmstrip, it means the last image that you applied any adjustments to it all. So whatever adjustment you had most recently applied will be duplicated for the current image.