Transcripts
1. Round Trip to Photoshop and Back from Lightroom and ACR - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Round Tripping to Photoshop and Back in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw. In addition to teaching Illustrator and Photoshop, the Graphic Design for Lunch series of classes also includes some photo editing and photo management classes. These are taught for both Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw as both applications share the same base code. This means that within him class, you'll simply focus on whichever application you prefer to use. Today, we're looking at round tripping photos from Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom to Photoshop so that you can do things in Photoshop that you may not be able to do in those other applications. But better still, I'm going to show you how you can get your photos back to the application that they came from, whether that be Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom. If you're watching these videos using a web browser, you're going to see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, I'd really appreciate it if you do two things for me. Firstly, give the class a thumbs-up and secondly, write in just a few words why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. Now if you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions. I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started looking at round tripping photos to Photoshop and back from both Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom. We're going to start with Lightroom.
2. Pt 1 - LR to Photoshop: I have a raw image here in light room that's already been processed. But what I want to do is I want to add a texture to this image. I can't add textures to images in Lightroom because Lightroom doesn't support layers. To be able to add a texture to this image, I have two open it in Photo-shop. The good news is that I don't have to leave Lightroom to do that. I can just right-click the image and choose Edit in and choose Edit in Adobe Photoshop. But before I do that, and before you do anything like that, it's worthwhile setting up the preferences in Lightroom for how you're going to take your image to Photoshop. To do this in Lightroom on a Windows machine, you'll choose Edit and then Preferences. On a Mac, you would choose Lightroom and then Preferences. In the Preferences panel, you're going to select External editing. Chances are if you have Photoshop already installed on your machine that Edit in Photoshop is an option. You may not be using this version of Photoshop, but whatever version of Photoshop you are using should be listed here. These are the current Lightroom settings for round tripping photos to Photoshop. You need to choose a file format because you can't take DNG images or raw images to Photoshop and have them come back as raw images. It's just not possible. You get a choice hear of round tripping them as TIFF files or PSD. You can choose whichever makes sense to you. For me, I tend to like PSD, so I'm going to choose PSD. Then I can choose my color space. Now ProPhoto RGB is a 16-bit color space. For me, I prefer to use sRGB or AdobeRGB. Because most of my images end up on the web anyway and I don't need to be using 16-bit color spaces in Photoshop. But if your needs are different, you can send it and receive it back into Lightroom as a ProPhoto RGB color space. I'm going to choose sRGB. Then the bit depth is important to. A lot of Photoshop filters won't work on 16-bit images, and again, because I'm going to the web, 8 bits is just fine for me. I'm going to leave the resolution at 240. The settings I've just configured are going to convert the image to sRGB color space. It's going to be an 8 bit image when it arrives in Photoshop. When it comes back to Lightroom automatically it's going to be saved as a PSD image, a layered file. I'll click Okay. Now I'll right-click the image, Edit in, and choose Adobe Photoshop. The image is opened automatically in Photoshop for me. If I had not already had Photoshop open, then Lightroom would have opened Photoshop and sent this image to Photoshop. The image has the sRGB color space, and it's an 8-bit image. You can check the mode for the image by choosing Image mode, and you'll see that it's 8 bits per channel RGB color. If we go to Edit and choose Color settings, you'll see that the current setting is sRGB. Now that we're in Photoshop, I can add the texture to my image, and I already had my texture image open, I right-click and choose Duplicate layer, and I'll go and send it to my image from Lightroom. Here it is, it's quite a bit smaller than that image, but I'm just going to size it to suit since it's a texture image, and I'm going to set the blend mode to Vivid Light. I'm just going to adjust the opacity down to about 60 percent. If I'm happy with this image now and I want to go back to Lightroom, what I'm gonna do is close the image. I'm just going to click it's Close button. I'm going to be prompted to save changes to the image. This is an important step. You need to click, Yes. The image is going to be closed and it's going to be sent back to Lightroom. When it arrives in Lightroom, it's going to be placed immediately alongside the original image. This is the original DNG image. Here is the PSD file. You can see that it's had dash edit added to the end of the file name, and it's a PSD file, it's a layered Photoshop PSD file. Now we can prove that by taking it back to Photoshop. Edit in, Photoshop. I can choose to edit a copy with Lightroom adjustments, Edit a copy or Edit the original. I'm going to edit the original, so I'll just click Edit. You can see that the original file that we just got back from Lightroom, here in Photoshop, is a layered PSD file. That's one method of round tripping photos from Lightroom to Photoshop. But there is another one and we're going to look at that in the next video.
3. Pt 2 - LR to Photoshop as a Smart Object: There is another way to round trip images from Lightroom into Photoshop. I've already made some adjustments to this image, but I want to make some spot fixes in the image and it's going to be easier to do that in Photoshop. I'll right click the image and choose edit in, and this time I'm going to select Open as Smart Object in Photoshop. Now, as expected, the image is taken from Lightroom into Photoshop, we already know that this is going to happen. Lightroom and Photoshop talk to each other so this process is seamless. But inside Photoshop you can seen that this image here is a smart object. I'm going to make a couple of changes to this image. I'm going to add a brand new layer. I'm going to choose the Spot Healing Brush Tool, I'm going to make sure it's set to sample all layers. Because this is going to allow me to remove some blemishes from this image, but to make the fixes on a second layer. Now that's important because you can't actually do spot healing on a smart object layer. If you see that when I select this smart object layer, I can't actually spot this image. I'll have to do it on a spare layer or a blank layer. But that is easily done. Now that I've fixed up the blemishes in this photo that I want to fix up, I'm looking at it and thinking more what if I need to make some alterations to the smart object? I'm going to double click on the smart object to do that. Now, somewhat surprisingly, perhaps this image has opened in Adobe Camera Raw, and that is because the smart object itself cannot be opened back up in Lightroom. The actual image that we took to Photoshop can, but if we expect to double click on the smart object and be able to edit the image back in Lightroom, that's not going to be the case. It's open here in Adobe Camera Raw. The spot fixes have not been applied to the image because they're on a separate layer. But we could make some adjustments too, for example, the exposure because all of these settings have come from Lightroom. When I'm ready, I'll click "Okay". I'm taken back to Photoshop where the adjustments have been applied to that smart object layer. You might see hear that as a result of adjusting the exposure on this image, that the spot healing brush fix is really obvious in this place so we would need to fix that up. I'm just going to the Eraser Tool, I'm just going to erase over that spot healing brush fix, and then I'll go back and refix it so that the image is now responding to the new settings that have been applied to it. If I'm finished with the image, I'm going to click the "Close" button. I'm going to select "Yes" to save it, and as expected it's now going back to Lightroom. It's going to appear alongside the original image. This is going to be the edit PSD version of the image and this is the original Lightroom version of the image, the raw image here, an eight bit PSD image here.
4. Pt 3 - ACR to Photoshop round trip: I have an image here, icon in Adobe Camera Raw, and I've already edited the image in Adobe Camera Raw, but I want to remove these boats, and I want to do that in Photoshop where I have superior tools for editing an image. The same situation would occur if I needed to add a texture to this image, for example, because Adobe Camera Raw like Lightroom cannot handle layers, you need to do the layer work in Photoshop. Now if I were to click "Open image" at this stage, this image is going to be open in Photoshop, but it's going to be open as an 8-bit image and it's going to be an Adobe RGB color mode. You might be curious as to why I know that, well, it's telling me down here, what it's going to be open at Adobe RGB 1998, 8-bit image. If I click to open this, you'll see that I have some workflow options so I can actually choose the color space that I want to use. I could choose any of a range of color spaces for this image, including sRGB, which would be appropriate for something that is going to the web, for example. You can also choose your bit depth so you can send it to Photoshop as an 8-bit or a 16-bit image. The same issue of course is going to apply to this image as would apply to one going from Lightroom to Photoshop. If you're sending it as a 16-bit image, they're going to be quite a few filters and perhaps tools in Photoshop that cannot be used on 16-bit images. 8-bit images are a little bit more flexible, of course there's not so much image data in them. Now you can also adjust the image size of an image as you open it in Photoshop, and you can do something else down here. You can choose to open it in Photoshop as a smart object so that may be an option you want to turn on. But even if you don't turn this on, it is still an option for going from Adobe Camera Raw to Photoshop, we're going to see that in a minute. If you want to specify things like color space and bit depth for your images as they go from Adobe Camera Raw to Photoshop, this is where you do it. I'm just going to click "Okay". Now if I click "Open image" at this point, the image is going to be opened in Photoshop as an 8-bit regular image. But if I hold down the Shift key, you'll see that open image changes to open object, and if I click on "Open object" then the image is going to be opened in Photoshop as a smart object. These settings are still going to be appropriate, but it is going to be a smart object and not just a regular layer. If I hold down the Alt option key then I can choose to open a copy. But I'm going to do Shift and click on "Open object". The image is opened in Photoshop as a smart object, and of course that means that I can use this spot healing brush tool inside Photoshop to adjust the image but I can't do it on the smart object layer because that's not a tool that you can use on a smart object so you need to click to add a new layer. Make sure that you set the options here for the spot healing brush tool to sample all layers, and then you can go ahead on this new layer and make your fix. Of course, you can also use tools such as the clone stamp tool. That's another tool that can be set to sample all layers so that you can make a fix using data from the smart object layer but do it on a new layer. You can also go ahead and add a texture to the image. I'm just going to add this texture to that image. Of course it's going to be applied as a new layer, and I'm just going to set this to overlay blend mode and just adjust the opacity down a little bit. If you ever want to make changes to the original image, all you need to do is double-click on the smart object and it's going to open up again back in Adobe Camera Raw. You can make your changes, for example, let's just make this black and white, click "Okay". Again, like we did in the Lightroom video, we've got the same problem of the spot healing brush fix being a color fix, and the underlying image has been converted to black and white, so we need to convert that to black and white too, or just go and apply it again.
5. Pt 4 - Use ACR from inside Photoshop: Before we leave to look at Adobe Camera Raw, let's just have a look at another workflow situation. I've made some changes, some edits to this image already and I'm just going to open it in Photoshop. I'm not going to open it as a smart object, so I'm just going to click on "Open Image". The image is opened as any regular image would be in Photoshop. It's an 8 bit RGB image. I'm going to apply my texture to this image and the texture on this image has given it a really, really old world look. But say that having applied this texture to the image, I want to take the whole lot back and I want to edit it in Adobe Camera Raw. Well, I can do so from inside Photoshop. What I'm going to do is I'm going to select the entire image, all the component paces for this image, I'm going to right click and I'm going to choose Convert to Smart Object. Having converted the entire image texture and the underlying image to a smart object, I can use the new Camera Raw Filter in Photoshop. I'll choose Filter and then Camera Raw Filter. What happens is that the entire image texture and all is now opened in Adobe Camera Raw so I have all the power of Adobe Camera Raw at my fingertips for this composite image. Now it's not showing any edits because the image itself has never been edited in its current format in Adobe Camera Raw so the handling is a little bit different here, but I do get the ability to make some changes to the image here and I could, for example, make it grayscale. I'll click "Okay" and then the entire image is going back to Photoshop. But the benefit of converting it to a smart object and applying the Camera Raw Filter to it that way is that if I don't like the look, I can go back to Adobe Camera Raw. I'm just going to double click on the Camera Raw Filter, the image is reopened in Camera Raw, I'm going to the HSL/Grayscale panel, I'm going to deselect Convert to Grayscale, and you can seen that in that smart object all the color detail was retained in the image. So I have a lot of flexibility with a workflow like this. I'll click, "Okay". Smart objects and the Camera Raw Filter inside Photoshop are one way of handling an image and, of course, you have some other ways of opening images from Adobe Camera Raw automatically in Photoshop as smart objects. But you can also do the reverse and actually create a smart object off just a regular image should you wish to do so.
6. Project and wrap up: Your project for this class is simply to tell me how you think you might use this roundtripping feature in your workflow. What are the tools that you like to use in Photoshop that are simply not available in Adobe Camera Raw or in Lightroom? In the class project area, just post a description of one or more of the tools in Photoshop that you think you can now make use of with this workflow for roundtripping your images from either Lightroom to Photoshop or Adobe Camera Raw to Photoshop. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and this has given you some things to think about in terms of incorporating Photoshop into your workflow even if most of your work is done in Adobe Camera Raw or in Lightroom. Now as you're watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt to recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class, give it a thumbs up and write just a few words about why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations will help other students to see that this is a class that they too may enjoy and learn from. Now if you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and I respond to all of your comments and questions and I look at and I respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
