One thing Apple got really right in Aperture was to make a zoom center wherever you clicked. So, if you click on a model’s eye, you see a zoomed version of that eye. Lightroom, by defaut, zooms to center, so if you click on that eye, you might get the bellybutton.

Tip #1: Zoom Clicked Point to Center

Choose the Preferences item from the Lightroom menu (this is different in Windows, I know… you’ll find it).

In the dialog box that comes up, in the “tweaks” section, tick the “Zoom clicked point to center” checkbox.

Dismiss the dialog and just like that, zooming happens to the point you choose!

Tip #2: Use Stacking Wisely

Aperture and Lightroom have a concept called stacking. If you are unfamiliar with it, imagine your images are a deck of cards, and they are arranged by suit. The top card is what shows and there are four stacks — one for each suit.

That’s kind of what happens when you stack your pictures. They take up a ton less space on the screen, and allow you to group them visually. So here’s an example: When shooting this model, we chose a them, took a number of shots, waited a minute or two to discuss the next theme, then moved into those shots.

Autostacking

There is a very cool feature called autostacking that takes advantage of the fact that photographers often shoot “in bursts”, as I described. Just go to Photo > Stacking > Auto-Stack by Capture Time. You can adjust the sensitivity slider to account for how long or short your pauses were, but the best guess of a minute is normally good.

Now that you have only a fraction of the images on the screen you had before, the question how to open up (expand) one of the stacks. The trick is to recognize a stack. Here is what one looks like:

See the little number 17 in the upper left corner of the image? That means there are 17 images in the stack including the one chosen to represent the stack. To open it up, the first thing many people do is unstack the photos. Not a good choice. What you want to do is “expand” the stack. To do this, click on the image representing the stack and press the S key.

As you can see, the highlighted image on the left is the top of the stack, and the dimmer frames are all the images contained in the stack. You can now edit or do whatever you like with these images. And you can press S on any one of them to collapse the entire stack neatly into place when you’re done.

There are many more stacking options including arranging the images within the stack and choosing the stack image. Just shop around the menus or check out the Adobe help for more tips on how to do this.