Well, I could tart this up as a Lightroom tip, which it is, but I should confess that no matter how well you know something, there’s a lot that passes you by. Credit for this is due to Rob Sylvan of Lightroomers.

I frequently use the Develop workspace’s Before/After view, usually via the shortcuts Y and Shift Y, and often switch the Before view to whatever helps me judge further edits. It’s a very powerful feature when you’re fine tuning a picture. Mostly, I’ll right click in the After pane and then choose Copy After’s Settings to Before, or I might click the corresponding button at the bottom of the screen. But I’ll also want to benchmark further work against earlier steps, in which case I’ll right click in History and select Copy History Step’s Settings to Before.

What Rob pointed out was this – you can actually drag and drop from the History panel to the Before pane. I’m a big fan of drag and drop in interfaces and it’s something that seems conspicuously absent in Lightroom, but don’t you think this is handy to know?

As for the picture I’m using here, it is a recent one and unusually for me is named with something other than a simply descriptive “Great Barford 2009” or “Musketeers”. Even as I set it up I was thinking “17th Century Gothic”. It couldn’t be called anything else, could it?