Search

How to Copy & Paste Adobe Camera Raw Edit Settings

  • Thread starter LukeLewis
  • Start date
LukeLewis

LukeLewis

Member
Joined
May 7, 2021
Messages
134
Reaction Score
0
Points
21
  • #1
This is pretty cool. I’m sure you already know how to apply edits to multiple photos at once in Adobe Camera Raw. I talked about how to do just that on this blog. If you haven’t read up on this method yet, please check out this post:

How To Edit More Than One Photo at a Time in Adobe Camera Raw

While the method I described in the above posts works very well if you’re a very organized person and intend to edit all of the images you’d like to update the same way at once, it’s not totally realistic. I’ll use a group of photos I was working on last night as an example to bring this point home.

Just last night, I wrote a post on my personal blog about a Dewalt drill I recently purchased. In this post, I shared multiple images of the drill. I wanted to give readers a chance to look at it from a variety of angles, not just the one or two shots they’d normally see it from. I took quite a few pictures of this drill (20, to be exact) and because of that, I had to decide which ones I’d use in the post. At the onset, I wasn’t sure which images would make it and which ones wouldn’t. Therefore, I didn’t want to edit all shots in Camera Raw simultaneously, even though they were taken under the same lighting conditions and on the same set.

Take a look at the thumbnail views of the photographs as they sit in Adobe Bridge. You should see that some images are edited and some aren’t. The most clear and saturated ones are the photos I updated last night and the foggy less-contrasty ones are those I didn’t touch.

adobe-bridge-thumbnails.jpg

Do you see where I’m going with this? If not, let me try to do a better job at explaining it.

I took 20 photos under the same conditions. I would like to use probably around half of them in a blog post. Initially, I don’t know which photos will be included in the half because I haven’t written the post and because I haven’t quite considered which photos are of the quality I’m after. Therefore, I don’t want to willy-nilly launch all the images into Camera Raw to edit them simultaneously. I’d like a more targeted method of, say, copying and pasting the edits I make in one photo to others in the same collection. That would certainly be nice.

Wouldn’t you guess, I’ve got a trick that will help with a situation just like this. Basically, Camera Raw and Bridge offer a keyboard shortcut that allows you to edit one photo in Camera Raw and then exit out of it. Then, while browsing through the thumbnails in Bridge, you can select the image you’ve already edited, copy the entire list of edits with the keyboard shortcut and apply those edits to any other thumbnail you wish. And the best part is, you don’t even need to open Camera Raw again. All of this is performed right in Bridge. This is why I called this post “cool” at the beginning. It is.

I’ll go through the process below.

Copying & Pasting Edits From One Thumbnail to Another​

Since I’ve already written the blog post in question, all the photos I wanted to use have been edited. That’s fine. For this post, I can pretend that I’d like to apply the edits from one of the images I’ve already touched to one I haven’t touched yet.

First, I’ll click on a thumbnail in Adobe Bridge that has had edits applied to it.

selected-thumbnail.jpg

Now, to copy the edits, I’ll use the following keyboard shortcut:

Alt+Ctrl+C (Windows)

Optn+Cmnd+C (Mac)

When I use the shortcut, nothing visibly will occur. Behind the scenes, the computer will place the previous photo’s edit setting on its clipboard. Now, all I need to do is decide which thumbnail image I’d like to apply those edits to and paste them.

I think I’ll apply them to a photo of the drill from another angle. I’ll select the thumbnail now.

selected-unedited-image.jpg

Now that the thumbnail is selected, I can begin pasting the edits to it. To do this, I’ll use this keyboard shortcut:

Alt+Ctrl+V (Windows)

Optn+Cmnd+V (Mac)

It’s basically the same shortcut. The only difference is that the C changed to a V. The interesting thing is, not everything is copied over right away. There are a few decisions that need to be made. Take a look at what happens right after I use the previous keyboard shortcut.

paste-camera-raw-settings.jpg

If I wanted to copy over all edits from one image to another, I could simply click on the OK button in the dialog box. If I wanted to refine which edits I copy over, I could check and uncheck the boxes next to each attribute manually. I could also take advantage of a handy tool that makes that task much faster.

subset-drop-down-box.jpg

If I select a choice from the Subset drop-down box, all boxes will become unchecked, except for the one area I select. It’s that easy. And if I select something from the drop-down and then change my mind and want everything checked again, I can click on the Check All button. Once I finish making up my mind in this area, I can click OK to apply the edits to the thumbnail.

edits-copied.jpg

If I launch this image into Camera Raw, I’ll find all the relevant sliders pushed to the same positions they were in the image I copied from.

As you can see, this quick trick has the potential to save a lot of time. I use this quite a bit and then open the photos into Camera Raw for further adjustment. Getting those initial adjustments done automatically relieves some of the headache of doing things repetitively in applications like this.

I hope I thoroughly explained how to copy Camera Raw edits from one image to another while in Adobe Bridge. If you have any questions or concerns, please leave them in the comment section below. Thanks for reading!
 
Top