Resetting Photos in Lightroom
A question from a friend: I accidentally did a sync settings and it affected everything in a library. Is there a way to force an undo back to “as shot” on all the JPGs and DNGs in the library?
My response: This is easy to do, and you have a couple of options for how to approach it.
Option 1: Undo the Sync by pressing Cmd-Z or Ctrl-Z, or selecting the Undo command under the Edit menu.
Option 2: if you can’t undo the sync (such as due to quitting Lightroom and coming back later, or for any other reason) you can Reset the photos.
If you want to Reset everything in the catalog, you can use the All Photographs image source for this. In the Library module, click on All Photographs in the Catalog panel.
If you only want to Reset some of the photos, you need to create a filtered source. You can use the Filter Bar or Smart Collections for this (more about this is in my Lightroom 2 book).
In either case, once you have the photos showing that you want to Reset, select them all (Cmd-A or Ctrl-A).
With the photos selected, press Shift-Cmd-R or Shift-Ctrl-R to Reset the photos’ Develop settings. (In the Library module, the Reset command is under the Photo > Develop Settings menu.)
Be careful when resetting; it will remove any adjustments you’ve made to the selected photos.
I did something worse than this. After getting new hardware because of previous problems, I deleted my LR catalog and started all over again, importing all of my work. I forgot that even if not using a pre-set, LR has some default values on Import – modest sharpening for example.
Here’s the problem – I had already finished working on all of these files! I have a mixture of DNG’s, TIFF’s and PSD’s, none of which I wanted any further adjustments on. If I select them all, zero out all of the LR adjustments and then synch, do they go back to the stage upon my re-import, or will then go to absolute zero values as iI had never worked on them at all? I automically save changes to XMP. Thanks.
Andrew-
By default, Reset will revert a photo back to the settings that were applied on import. This means that if a Develop Preset was applied, that will become the reset state; if not, the Lightroom Defaults will be used.
However, in your case, if you had always been automatically saving XMP changes, you *should* be OK! Because When Importing photos, if Lightroom find XMP settings, it will preserve and respect them.
By default TIF, PSD and JPG will be imported as Zeroed (no adjustments) because Lightroom will assume they’ve already been processed UNLESS there are XMP settings present.
Look carefully at your photos and their settings to determine if anything really has changed. You may find that everything was retained from the previous editing.
In the future, if you want to migrate files from one catalog to another, use the Import/Export to/from catalog options. This will ensure all your adjustments — plus collections and virtual copies — will remain intact in the new catalog.
Hi! I have a problem hoping you can help me with… I exported my edited colour photos from lightroom and then batch processed them (synced settings) to black and white – half way through adjusting the black and white’s I realised only a third of the colour shots exported! So I tried clicking undo to go back but I could only undo my last few settings and after a few clicks the undo button greyed out so I was unsuccessful at getting back to my colour shots I edited. Is there any way I can get the edited colour shots back?? I on’t want to press “reset” – as this will only give me the original files unedited and all my hard work down the drain…. Please help!!!
Mandi – all your edits to photos in Lightroom have unlimited History, accessed from the History panel in the left side of the Develop module. You can go back to any point, in this case the last step before you Synced the settings.
But going forward, it’s always best to use Virtual Copies when you want to create several versions of photos. VCs allow you to maintain all your separate versions in the catalog without requiring you to Export separate files at any point in the workflow. To make a VC, you can right click (or control+click) on a photo snd select Make Virtual Copy from the popup menu.
Hope this helps. Thanks for your comment!