By the way, if you’re working in collections (called “albums”
in Lightroom “cloud”), the image that comes back from
Photoshop will be right next to the original in Lightroom.
If you’re working in Folders (booo!), then it may appear
as the last image in your Folder, rather than right beside
the original. Just a heads up on that. Okay, that’s the
process; it’s quick and easy.OTHER FILE FORMATS
But what if you’re shooting in JPEG on your camera?
Then the process is a little different, but still super easy.
When you either choose the Edit in Adobe Photoshop
menu command, or press Command-E (PC: Ctrl-E) to
take your JPEG image over to Photoshop, it brings up
the dialog shown here.
Yes, it’s that easy to get your image back to Lightroom;
just save and close.CHOOSE FILE FORMAT FOR
IMAGES SENT TO PHOTOSHOP
There’s one more thing you might want to know about:
You do get to choose the file format for that copy of your
original that goes over to Photoshop, whether it started out
as a RAW or JPEG image. You choose it from Lightroom
Classic (PC: Edit)>Preferences, under the External Editing
tab. Where it says Edit in Adobe Photoshop 2021 up top,
under the File Format drop-down menu, you can choose
which format you want to send over to Photoshop.
I have mine set to PSD rather than TIFF (the file
sizes are smaller, they’re compatible with most every
application on earth, and there’s no visible loss of
quality). I wrote an article why you should never use
TIFF as a file format anyway, and it made enough
people mad (apparently, some folks had been saving
as TIFFs for years and got very defensive) that I’m not
even going to post a link to it here, but I still strongly
believe that you don’t need to save files as TIFFs in
99.9% of the situations you’ll run into (or basically like
never). We’ll talk about Color Space and Bit Depth on
another day, but you can see my settings in the screen
grab shown here.It gives you a description below each choice, but
I can tell you that I use the top choice, Edit a Copy with
Lightroom Adjustments, about 99.9% of the time. I’ve
never once had a need to send an image over with the
second choice—the one that ignores what I’ve done
in Lightroom—but at least it’s an option if you wanted
that for some reason (I can’t think of one, but I’m sure
there’s at least one).
If the third option, Edit Original, sounds risky, like you
might be possibly messing up your original image, that’s
only because it is risky, and you could mess up your only
original, so I don’t choose this option. Well, there’s one
single instance you might choose it, and that’s a very
specialized situation that we’ll cover in a future column,
but for now, let’s stick with what’s behind door #1, the
topmost choice: Edit a Copy with Lightroom Adjustments.
Once your image is over in Photoshop, the process is
the same: When you’re done editing, just save and close.Okay, we’re off and running with our new column, and
we’ve learned how to get our images over to Photoshop
and then back in Lightroom one piece. It’s a good start, but
there’s lots and lots more to come. See you next issue! nALL IMAGES BY SCOTT KELBY PHOTOSHOP FOR LIGHTROOM USERSKELBYONE.COM