It'll be a little while before Adobe can deliver on its recent promise to make Lightroom faster, but that doesn't mean you can't still figure out ways to make the program work faster for you. Case in point: photoshopCAFE founder Colin Smith has put together this really useful video outlining 7 'hidden secrets' in Adobe Lightroom that will definitely help you get more out of the Raw editor.

Some of these tips are genuinely useful, and we're going to guess that at least one or two of them will be new to you even if you've been using Lightroom for years.

Smith covers the tips in detail (and shows you how to use them) in the video above, but here's the TL;DW version:

  1. Right click in the panels of the Develop module and enable 'Solo Mode.' This only allows one panel to stay open at a time, collapsing the rest.
  2. Click and drag your panel sidebar out to the left to make your sliders longer.
  3. Hold down Command (CTRL on Windows) and double click the center of a shape like a radial filter, and it will automatically snap to the edges of the photo you're editing.
  4. Right click and uncheck to hide both modules and panels you don't use.
  5. The Develop module doesn't work on videos, but you can sync edits made to a single frame of that video onto the full thing. Just pull a frame, edit it, and then select the frame and video both and click Sync.
  6. You can turn any collection into a 'Quick Collection' by right clicking it and selecting 'Set as Target Collection.' Now you can curate photos into that collection with a single click.
  7. If you have multiple photos selected, you can still see the metadata for an individual photo without deselecting the bunch. Just click Metadata > Show Metadata for Target Photo Only.

And that's it! Obviously these tips are easier to take in by actually watching the video, so click play, learn a little something and let us know which (if any) of these 'hidden secrets' were actually new to you.