Posts tagged with Photoshop

Linked Photoshop smart objects

Is there an option to create a linked smart object instead of an embedded one when exporting a photo to PS? No, sadly LR cannot directly create a linked smart object, so you have to do something like this: First in LR select the image and do a Save Metadata to File (CmdS on Mac, …read more

Big PSBs and fooling Lightroom

A workaround to catalogue very large PSBs

Merge to Panorama

While this site is about Lightroom, I thought this article From the ACR Team: Merge to Panorama was worth pointing out as it combines in-house knowledge about the LR/ACR processes with thoughts about using the camera to take advantage of them.

Lightroom Mobile and Photoshop

Here’s a nice little feature in Photoshop 2018. Its Welcome page now lets you directly access photos you’ve synced in Lightroom.

Running a Photoshop action

Is it possible to run a Photoshop action from LR? Yes, by running a droplet. I’ll assume you know how to make a droplet – if not, see this example – and then you can approach it a couple of ways. One way is to save the droplet anywhere on your computer. You then set …read more

Grayscale mode and droplets

How to export pictures in Grayscale Mode from LR. You can use a Photoshop droplet for this, and many other tasks.

Should I save as PSD or TIF?

Should I save as PSD or TIF? TIF. There are no quality differences, and there’s almost nothing that a PSD can do that a TIF can’t do just as well, just obscure things like saving Duotone mode images (hat tip Victoria Bampton). In the long run it’s important to save your Photoshop work in a …read more

Photoshop smart objects

How do I update a Photoshop smart object with changes Lightroom has made to the raw file? In Lightroom, go to the original raw file and make the adjustments. Then either: Edit as Smart Object, sending a new file to PS with the raw edits. Open your existing TIF fileĀ  in PS, and drag this …read more

“Edit in” or “Open as Smart Object” in Photoshop?

Unless you’ve a good reason, I would always choose Open as Smart Object. Good reasons might be you’re running out of hard drive space, or you have an earlier version of Photoshop than your version of Lightroom. OK, now why? I tend to assume there’s a fair chance you’ll want to fine tune the raw …read more

Silver Efex Pro 2

I’ve never been one who photographs in colour and occasionally dabbles with black and white. It’s very much the other way round, and I often look at pictures I’ve left in colour and think they’re rather monochrome anyway. But I’ve never seen doing a lot of b&w work as a reason why I would want …read more

B&W from different angles

There’s an interesting comparison of doing black and white in Capture One 6, Silver Efex 1, and Lightroom 3 by Mike at The Intuitive Lens. It’s a two parter with Capture One vs Silver Efex and then both vs Lightroom. I’m not sure it proves much, if anything, other than one if one tries to …read more

Lightroom, Photoshop and timelapses

There’s an excellent couple of movies by Julianne KostĀ on using Lightroom and particularly Photoshop for timelapse movies . Part 1 is the relatively obvious Lightroom work, but the much more interesting part 2 shows Photoshop (Extended) assembling the movie, adding lens blurs in a batch, and – the bit I didn’t know – including sound. …read more

What has Aperture done to my x@%king metadata?

I'll be posting some of my own thoughts on Aperture 3 soon, maybe tomorrow. But I just noticed David Riecks has some issues with how Apple Aperture 3 writes metadata and I recommend you read his article very carefully indeed: Apple has made some significant changes to how Aperture handles metadata with this latest release. …read more

Tough love…

If you’ve ever used iView or Extensis Portfolio, or many other non-Adobe programs, you will have learnt long ago that Photoshop’s Maximize Compatibility dialog box did exactly what it said on the tin – it maximised the PSD or TIF file’s compatibility with other programs. Failing to choose this setting would save disc space at …read more

DPi and an announcement

Last week's DPI show was fun. Only doing one platform session a day, it was a lot less arduous than the three daily sessions I did at Focus, and it meant I spent my time doing Q&A on Lightroom and Photoshop. Working one to one, or with small groups, you're able to establish their needs …read more

Blur with Clarity

Maybe I’m unable to appreciate the subtleties he’s trying to express, but I was somewhat underwhelmed with both of Alain Briot’s essays on in-camera blurred landscapes (part 1 and part 2). Such images “need to rely both on color, placement of elements and use of shapes and lines to be successful”, “the type of light …read more

Thoughts on learning Lua

No, I’m not going to write any tutorials, but Sean suggested writing some thoughts on learning Lua for Lightroom…. Getting this far with Lua has been a real struggle. I am not a trained programmer like Jeffrey Friedl. I know no C, C++, Cocoa etc, so I don’t know if Lua is easy for people …read more

The bleeding war book

So often it takes a fresh pair of eyes to notice something. As I wrote here, I'm designing my Blurb book in InDesign rather than following BookSmart's canned layouts, meaning the recommended workflow is InDesign > PDF > Photoshop > PNGs > BookSmart. While I could set up a Configurator app to automate saving multiple …read more

Pandora’s box – or InDesign to Blurb

There’s never one way to do something, and whether it’s climbing a hill or putting together a book, it usually makes sense to have a good look around before setting out. Initially I’m going to do a test book with the minimum number of pages and trying out things like colour images (eek) or double …read more

Derrick Story podcast

Derrick Story's latest podcast is Adobe Engineer Pops the Hood on CS4: Meet Winston Hendrickson, Sr. Director, Engineering, Digital Media, for Adobe. During this chat in a conference room at Adobe headquarters, Winston and I talk about what's happening under the hood for Bridge, ACR, and Photoshop. He explains lots of goodies such as, the …read more