LR:Shorts
I love teaching keyboard shortcuts. But sometimes they come back to bite me. In this particular case, to help my students speed up their workflow, I teach them the keyboard shortcut of tapping the Y key in the Develop module for a preview of side-by-side before and after develop changes. Tap the Y again and you’re back in the Develop Loupe View. And here’s the common keyboard shortcut error in Lightroom: the T key is positioned right next to the Y key. And when T is unintentionally tapped instead of Y, you may not notice that it causes a change across all of the Lightroom modules; it hides the Toolbar! Sometimes you don’t notice it’s missing until you need it, especially if you use a lot of keyboard shortcuts or work in a hurry (like I do).

This notification banner only appears for a couple of seconds, just above the bottom filmstrip. In Lightroom versions 1 through 4 there was no notification banner!
There you are, having such a great time developing your photos and enjoying tapping that Y key to jog back and forth to preview your Before/After. You take your eyes off the monitor, press the T key by accident, then press the Y to cover your mistake. Oops! Banner goes up, banner disappears. You missed it because you’re still looking at the keyboard! You look up. You’re in Before/After, so all is right with the world. But you missed the warning banner and now, at some point, you find yourself wondering, dude, where’s my Toolbar?
Tapping the T key hides and reveals the Toolbar in every one of Lightroom’s modules not just the Develop module. Simply tap T and the Toolbar returns.

Tapping”T” Hides and Reveals the Lightroom Options Bar
Unlike Photoshop where keyboard shortcuts are consistent throughout the application, many of Lightroom’s keyboard shortcuts do one thing in a given module and have a different function in another module. So it’s really important to look over Lightroom’s keyboard shortcuts in the manual.
Here’s the link to the current Lightroom manual in its entirety – you’ll find all of Lightroom’s keyboard shortcuts in Chapter 17.