Learn how to take an image from Lightroom to Photoshop and back again. This will ensure that the image appears back in Lightroom, automatically added to the catalog, with the original version backed up. I also demonstrate the different possible settings so that you may customize this process.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can take an image from Lightroom to Photoshop and back successfully. I’m here in the Develop module in Lightroom and I’ve already done some work on this particular image. And I’m pretty happy with it. The problem is in this animal’s eye though you can see that there’s a little shape here that I want to get rid of.

Now I could get rid of this in Lightroom but it’s going to be a whole lot easier to take this image into Photoshop. So we’re going to do that now. To take an image from Lightroom into Photoshop I’m going to let Lightroom control the process. I’ll right click and choose Edit in. Because Photoshop has already been installed and Lightroom is aware of that I’m going to click Edit in Adobe Photoshop CS6. If I was using a different version of Photoshop I would select that from the list. I’ll click here. And now what’s happening is that Lightroom is asking me what I want to edit, either a copy of this image with the Lightroom adjustments, just a copy of the original or the original itself. In this particular case I want to edit this image with the Lightroom adjustments. So I’m going to edit a copy with Lightroom adjustments and click Edit.

If Photoshop is not already open Photoshop will be opened now. But here’s our image inside Photoshop and I’m just going to size it so that we can see the area in question. And now I’m going to bring in the tools. I have here the spot healing brush tool which is going to be the tool that’s going to help me fix this problem. I think I need to zoom in a little bit closer still so let’s get right into this problem area. And now with the spot healing brush tool I can size it down to suit the problem area and just start working over it. I could also use the clone tool if I wanted to. Any of these tools are going to help me fix this issue. And working with this tool in Photoshop is going to be a whole lot easier than working with the similar tools in Lightroom because I can just be a whole lot more accurate in Photoshop. If I want to undo it I just press Ctrl Alt Z to undo the change.

So when I’m happy with the resulting eye I’m just going to zoom out, make sure it all looks fine, which it does for this particular eye. I’ll probably fix this one while I’m here, but let’s call this good for now. And because I’m ready to go back to Lightroom now I’ve fixed the problem, I’m just going to close this image. So I’m just going to click the X button to close it. I’ll get a message which will say do you want to save changes to the document and I’ll say yes. The important thing at this point is not to choose File, Save as because you want to send the image back to Lightroom in the format that Lightroom sent it to Photoshop.

Now we’re back in Lightroom. The image that we’re looking at is the one that has been the fixed eye. And you can see here it’s called lionanimaleyes edit.tif. What Photoshop has done in conjunction with Lightroom is it’s taken the image, applied the edits to it and then sent it back as a TIF file with -edit after it. This is the original file. We haven’t lost the original. We’ve just got a copy back with the edits applied to it. Now the settings that Lightroom uses when exporting to Photoshop and receiving the image back are in the preferences setting.

I’ll choose Edit and then Preferences. And we’ll go to External Editing. You can see here that edit in Photoshop CS6 is set up as a TIF file. If we wanted to we could bring it back as a PSD file but TIF was selected here. It’s being sent out as proPhoto RGB with a 16 bit depth, a resolution of 240. And here’s the file naming. It’s coming back with the same file name with -edit on it. You can see that we’re using custom settings. Here’s the edit and here are our custom settings, the original file name with –edit applied, and then either PSD or TIF depending on what it is that we have set here for the file format. So all of this is customizable and this is where it’s being controlled as to what it goes out to Photoshop as and what it comes back into Lightroom as. And provided you use that process of just choosing File, Close or File, Save from Photoshop and not Save As so you don’t give it a name, you let Photoshop and Lightroom deal with it, then you’re going to be able to work seamlessly between Lightroom and Photoshop and back again.

I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. If you enjoyed this tutorial place click Like. You can subscribe to my channel and hear more about videos that are launched regularly every week in future.