Today’s Question: I find that I need a very delicate hand on the adjustment sliders in Lightroom. Just a touch does it. I am getting better but wonder if there is an adjustment that can be made somewhat like adjusting the speed of a mouse?
Tim’s Quick Answer: There are two options here that might help you. First, you can indeed adjust the “acceleration” setting for the mouse, which affects the speed at which the mouse moves. Second, you might want to use keyboard shortcuts to fine-tune the settings for your adjustments.
More Detail: Moving the mouse obviously results in a corresponding movement of the mouse pointer, but there is an option to adjust the sensitivity of that mouse movement. In other words, you can choose whether you want a small movement of the mouse to translate to a relatively small or large movement of the mouse pointer.
You can adjust this setting on Windows by adjusting the Mouse Speed setting under the Mouse option in the Control Panel. You can even turn off mouse acceleration altogether if you prefer. On Macintosh you can adjust the Tracking Speed setting in the Mouse section of the System Preferences dialog to achieve the same basic result.
Another great option is to use keyboard shortcuts to adjust the slider values in Lightroom. To enable this option for a given adjustment you first need to click your mouse pointer on the numeric value associated with the adjustment control you want to change.
Once the numeric value associated with a given adjustment slider is active, you can press the up arrow key on the keyboard to increase the value and the down arrow key on the keyboard to decrease the value. You can also hold the Shift key while pressing the up or down arrow key to apply a larger adjustment. With most adjustment sliders, using the Shift key in conjunction with the up or down arrow key will cause a ten-fold increase or decrease in the value compared to the normal behavior of the up and down arrow keyboard shortcut.
Personally, I prefer to have my mouse configured to be relatively sensitive, meaning that a relatively small movement causes the mouse pointer to move a relatively large distance. However, I also find that I sometimes struggle with the mouse when it comes to manipulating the adjustment sliders in Lightroom. Therefore, I’ll frequently use the up and down arrow keyboard shortcuts to fine-tune the adjustment settings when working on an image in Lightroom.