Jumping from Lightroom to Photoshop and Back


While Lightroom is great for organizing your photos and processing RAW images, it's not Photoshopit doesn't do special effects, or photo retouching, or one of the bazillion (yes, bazillion) things that Adobe Photoshop CS2 does. So, there will be numerous times where you'll want to take your photo and jump directly over to Photoshop to do some retouching, and then jump right back to Lightroom. Luckily, the two applications were born to work together.

Step One

To edit the photo you're currently working on in Photoshop, just go under the Photo menu (in either the Develop module or the Library module) and choose Edit in Adobe Photoshop CS2 (as shown here). This will bring up a dialog (shown in the next step) that asks how you want to edit the photo.

©SCOTT KELBY

Step Two

The first two choices, Edit Original and Edit a Copy, ignore any of the changes you've made thus far in Lightroom (these two choices are not available if your photo is in RAW or DNG format). If you pick the third choice, Edit a Copy with Lightroom Adjustments (as shown), then it creates a copy of your photo (so you're not editing the original), but that copy does contain any edits you made to the photo in Lightroom. So, if you adjusted the white balance, or shadows, or exposure, all those changes will be applied to the copy that will open in Photoshop.

Step Three

When you click the Edit button, it launches Adobe Photoshop CS2 and opens your photo within Photoshop. Now you can make your edits (in this case, I applied a quadtone effect to my photo in Photoshop CS2 to add depth and make it look warmer overall). When you're done editing in Photoshop, close the file and save your changes (that's important). Now, when you return to Lightroom and look in the Library, you'll see you now have two versions of your photothe original (shown in the second row down, on the far left), and the edited version with the quadtone effect applied in Photoshop (circled in red here). Notice that the edited version has the word "Edit" added after its name.

©SCOTT KELBY

Step Four

If you want to quickly compare the original with your version just edited in Photoshop, click on the original, press-and-hold the Command key and then click on the edited version. Then click on the Compare button on the bottom-left side of the Lightroom Library module, and both photos will appear for your review (as shown here).

Note: The only reason we have two copies of our file is because we chose to work on a copy in the Edit Photo dialog that appears in Step Two. If you have a JPEG or TIFF file and choose to work on the original, then you're doing just that working on the original in Photoshop. So when you return to Lightroom, you've edited that one original photo.



The Adobe Lightroom eBook for Digital Photographers
The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers
ISBN: B001FA0MWK
EAN: N/A
Year: 2006
Pages: 71
Authors: Scott Kelby

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