LR2 & editing in CS4

Mike_J_Smith

Mike_J_Smith

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Name
Mike
Edit My Images
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Hi,

I am trying to use LR2 more & more to give me a faster workflow rather than opening every file in Photoshop. My workflow is basically save RAW files to disk; import to LR; mess around with files; export to jpg when needed.

However, sometimes I want to edit in CS4. I can use the "edit in" to open a file from LR to CS, but is there a way to make the required edits in CS4 and then save them back into LR, rather than saving the CS4 edited photo as a tiff (no jpg option) and importing that photo back into LR2 and therefore having a duplicate in LR.

If not, what is the best way of editing photos in Photoshop and then getting them back into LR?

Cheers, Mike
 
Mike

The way both Lightroom and Photoshop handle the image would make this very difficult to do. Lightroom stores the original image and has the changes you make to the image stored within it's database as meta data. So it could always be undone and no action is taken on the original RAW file. These changes are applied at the rendering stage when the image is output.The original file remains untouched

Photoshop works effectively on the original pixels. So in that context it is a destructive process. Hence the need to reimport the worked on image back into Lightroom, as the retouching information is not stored as retrievable metadata.

I would suggest the best worflow is to use Lightroom to make as many of the image correction changes you need to make, then if required export that into Photoshop to do the things Lightroom can't do, or Photoshop is better at doing. Don't forget you can save the image as a PSD so if you work in layers you can retain those changes you made to the image, should you need to revisit them.

Also remember that Lightroom can still work on the Photoshop edited image if you need to make additional changes after the Photoshop file has been saved.
 
OK, that makes sense.

So I would save the psd file and then import that into lightroom? Can you import to Lightroom directly from Photoshop? I guess it would then be possible to stack the two together or even to delete out the original file from LR.
 
If you "Export to Photoshop" ( ctrl/cmd E) and the simply Save. It will save the edited image in Lightroom next to the original. It will have the file suffix -Edit- plus the proper extension TIFF or PSD.

Yes you could delete the original, but to be honest I'd keep both, unless you have a lot of Photoshop edited files, even then I'd still keep theorriginal
 
Chappers said:
If you "Export to Photoshop" ( ctrl/cmd E) and the simply Save. It will save the edited image in Lightroom next to the original. It will have the file suffix -Edit- plus the proper extension TIFF or PSD.
Click to expand...

OK, that's cool. I'll try this later, thanks for the help.
 
I edit a copy with lightroom adjustments in photoshop and open as psd (so it creates an image called Image-edit. If you work in layers and save it back it's saved with all the layers info as well back into lightroom.

If you need to edit again you end up with -edit-edit, or -edit2 etc
 
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