Thursday, October 9, 2008

Photoshop and Lightroom Integration - Part 2

I've received a bunch of e-mails about working Lightroom into the workflow. Lightroom is great for managing your photos and/or getting them off of your camera. It's also a great little program for making quick adjustments. But what about using it with Photoshop? It's really easy.

We just looked at setting up Lightroom to make this process as easy as possible. Now, let's look at how it works.

After you've imported the image and made whatever adjustments are necessary in Lightroom, click on Cmd-E/Ctrl-E to open the Edit with Photoshop dialog. You can also find it in the menu by clicking on Photo>Edit In>Edit in Adobe Photoshop CS3 (assuming you have CS3 loaded, of course).



You are then presented with a dialog box and three options.
  1. Edit a Copy with Lightroom Adjustments - (RAW shooters, this is your only option) this applies the adjustments that you just made in Lightroom to the image, then opens it up in Photoshop.
  2. Edit a Copy - just like it sounds, you'll open up a copy of the image in Photoshop ... but the Lightroom adjustments won't be applied.
  3. Edit Original - again, just like the box says ... we're working on the original image here. It should go without saying that this option is not recommended for our work.
For me, I choose the first option most of the time. After all, what's the point of using the cool correcting features of Lightroom, only to abandon them on the way to Photoshop?



Stack with original should be checked so that Lightroom will keep your Photoshop edited version with the original image, making it easier to keep organised.

Next we'll see what happens when we get to Photoshop and back again. Until then, enjoy.

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