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How to jump from Lightroom to Photoshop (and back)
Lightroom is a superb tool for photographers – it is the business when it comes to organising your photos, processing them and for presenting them – either as a slideshow or printed. However there are times when you’ll still want to just Photoshop your image or parts of your image so this tutorial is about how to jump from Lightroom to Photoshop and then back again. They are tightly integrated so the good news is that it’s really easy.
1. Let’s say that you are already in Lightroom and have made the changes that you want and now you want to jump into Photoshop. First set up the editor preferences – you only need to do this once.
2. Choose Edit > Preferences and then click on the External Editing tab.
If you have either Photoshop or Photoshop Elements installed on your computer, Lightroom will detect that and set Photoshop as your default external editor, but you can also specify some options for how the files are sent over to Photoshop.
The top of the dialog box shows options for choosing the file format of photos sent to Photoshop – either TIFF or PSD. Choosing TIFF also lets you pick a compression method (None or ZIP) which means that your image filesize won’t be so big (if you pick ZIP).
The options for colour space are ProPhoto RGB, sRGB and Adobe RGB(1998). If you’re using RAW, then ProPhoto RGB is the best option and recommend by Adobe. If your camera is set to shoot JPEG or TIFF, however, you will need to choose one of the other two colour spaces because the camera is embedding one of those profiles in your camera. (Take a look in the camera manual to see which one).
Click OK.
Once you’ve set your preferences from now on, you’ll only need to do the following steps to jump into Photoshop from Lightroom.
3. Choose Photo > Edit in Adobe Photoshop CS3 (or CS2 or CS4, if you have that), or use the keyboard shortcut Command-E (PC: Ctrl-E).
The Edit Photo In … dialog box opens and from here you can choose the following options;
Choose one option and click Edit.
Your image now opens in Photoshop.
5. Now let’s say I’ve made some changes in Photoshop and I want to get back to Lightroom with my newly improved picture. Choose File > Save or just Close the image. DO NOT choose Save As. If you change the name of the file it won’t pick up the changes in Lightroom and your workflow is broken.
Now click back into Lightroom and you will see either your changed file or your changed file and a copy of the changed file.
The changed file will have "–Edit" added to the end of the filename. And that’s it!
Are you using Photoshop and Lightroom together? Or just one or the other?
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Nice tutorial Jennifer!
Kyle Tunneys last blog post..Budapest
Thanks Kyle.
I have been able to do all of the above – no problem; I shoot in raw; now I have set up a 2nd catalog – with all of the same settings as far as I can tell (preferences and catalog settings )… and when I leave Photoshop – Cmd S,
it does save the new version to my harddrive but it does not show up in Lightroom. I have checked filters, stacks, etc. and none of those appear to be the problem.
Would you have any ideas ? Your tutorial was so clear and concise – I thought you might have a tip or idea where a setting might be wrong, etc.
Hey, i’m having a problem. I’m using Lightroom 1.4 but it doesn’t seem to detect the photoshop cs3 i’m using.. any way to fix it?
VRy interesting to read it
I just started using lightroom and this tutorialhas saved me a lot of time… Thanks for this!
You you should make changes to the post title How to jump from Lightroom to Photoshop (and back) | Jennifer Farley : Laughing Lion Design Ireland to more generic for your subject you create. I loved the blog post all the same.
I’m working with Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom 3. With the older versions I could save my photoshop file and it would transfer to lightroom no problem. Now with the newer versions, I save and it creates a huge separate TIFF file in Lightroom. I DON’T want TIFF files! The only solution I’ve found is to save as a different name, then go find it and re-import it. I really don’t like this. Any solutions?
Hi: Note #3 states:
3. Choose Photo > Edit in Adobe Photoshop CS3 (or CS2 or CS4, if you have that), or use the keyboard shortcut Command-E (PC: Ctrl-E)….I think you meant to say Photo>Edit in Lightroom, not Photoshop. Some might be confused. Anyway, thanks for the tips…really helped!
Hi, I’ve cut a photo in photoshop and edited it in adobe lightroom. But after exporting a white background is coming around the photo. What to do. I appreciate ur guidance. Thanku
thank you!
I hope you don’t mind a quick question. I’m so frustrated! I just got LR3 and I’m only familiar with CS4… LR is all new to me. (Reading your site and trying to get as much info as I can – thank you so much!)
I figured out how to roundtrip from LR to CS4, but when I try to “edit in CS4 with Lightroom adjustments”… it won’t give me the option to save as a jpeg. Jpeg isn’t even offered as a choice in the dropdown menu. If I choose “edit original” or “edit copy” it works fine. I have no idea what to try…can you help? Thank you so much!
That was great. Thanks for the tip. It really makes editing and organizing much easier, and saves some time.