| Joined: | Wed Apr 11th, 2012 |
| Location: | Melbourne, Australia |
| Posts: | 525 |
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You will see that the file extensions I have below are DNG, that is because some time ago after some reading around I choose to use DNG for my DAM. Whilst I am happy with this I know there are other schools of thought, and you do not need to convert to DNG for this method to work, it works perfectly well with native Raw files as long as they are supported by Lightroom.
The light room preference panel can be accessed on a Mac by clicking on 'Lightroom' in the commands menu and I believe accessed on a PC by clicking on 'File'. In this panel you can set up the options for editing images from Lightroom, into an external image editor.
By default light room will select the latest version of Photoshop installed on your computer as its default image-editing program. It also offers an option of a 2nd program that you can set up in the preferences panel. The default file format for editing with Photoshop is TIFF; I generally change this to PSD, which is purely a personal preference.
The default colour scheme is Prophoto RGB, and 16-bit images; I generally leave these as they are as this carries the maximum possible amount of information into Photoshop for editing.
You can see the preference panel for Lightroom in the below screenshot.
Once you have the preferences set up as you desire, from the library module select the image that you wish to edit and then either go to 'Photo'>'Edit in' from the menu bar or, as I normally do, command or 'right click' on the image to pull up the contextual menu options and choose 'Edit In>'.
You can see from the screen shot that I have CS6 set up as my primary editor, Lightroom did this automatically after I downloaded the Beta version for trial. The second editor I have there is CS5, which I set up after the Beta came in. I used to have DXO set up in my Pc days and this worked well also, although the integration is not so smooth as with Adobe products.
Three options will be presented, choose 'Edit Copy using Lightroom adjustments'. Once you have selected this option, if your version of photoshop's ACR is out of date a warning message will appear on the screen telling you of this. One of the options presented is 'Render Using Lightroom'.
When you have finished editing the image in Photoshop just save the file (do not use 'Save as') and then close the file. When you come back to Lightroom, you will see your Photoshop edited version next to the original Raw file in the light room library (as long as you left 'Stack with Original' ticked in the preference panel, see top screen shot). You can use the light room filters to search for PSD or TIF files. I generally do all my output work from Lightroom, many of the images I use do not need to go into Photoshop, given the power of ACR editing these days.
In the screenshot where I chose to edit the image with Photoshop you will see that there are some other options, some of which are greyed out. Opening the image as a smart object in Photoshop allows you to double-click on the smart object layer and alter the ACR settings. This can be very useful if putting together composite images, but clearly won't work if your Photoshop ACR is out of date which is the purpose of this tutorial. The merge to panoramic and HDR options will take multiple images from Lightroom and open them in either the HDR or panoramic merge modules in Photoshop. You can also take multiple images into Photoshop as individual layers, which is the bottom option in the screenshot, 'open as layers in Photoshop'.