The Digital Photo Experience

Last time we discussed file management in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, including how to import images into the database, where your files are stored and how the changes made in Lightroom are non-destructive. That leads to the inevitable question – “How do I get my edited images out of Lightroom?” Since Lightroom changes don’t actually affect your digital negatives and the Lightroom database has all of the steps you took to obtain your developed image, you need to put them together in a way that is usable in other editing applications or to export for uses such as the web.

Before we create a file for the web, you may want to edit the file further in an application such as Adobe Photoshop CS4. We can tell Lightroom we want to “edit in” that program. When we do this, Lightroom will convert the file to a usable format and send the converted file out to the application. By default if you have Photoshop installed you can do this by hitting CTRL-E ! You can also right-click (command click on mac) an image and choose “Edit in” and select your application. Lightroom will combine your digital negative with all of your changes when it creates this file, so your editing application will know about all of your Lightroom edits. Once you finish editing in the pixel editor and save the file, your image is saved on your hard drive and automatically updated in Lightroom. In this way, Lightroom remains your “home base” for all of your images, you still have your original digital negative and now you have the edited .TIF or .PSD in your library.

What now? Well, the Export module is where we go next.

An export takes your original or pixel-edited file, combines it with all of your Lightroom edits and exports it into a usable format, usually a .JPG. There are also export plugins, but we’ll discuss those next time.

Once you get to the Export page, you are presented with a number of choices. You can play with a lot of these to try different settings that you like. A few of the key settings to pay attention to are: File Settings, Resize to Fit:, Sharpening, Metadata and Post-Processing.

Under File Settings, when exporting to the web you should always use JPEG and sRGB. Why sRGB?

The Image Sizing section allows you to customize the exported file size. 800/800 and 72 ppi is a good medium size for the web.

Output Sharpening lets you control the type of display and how much of Lightroom’s sharpening algorithm to apply for that display. More on output sharpening here.

Metadata allows you to have some basic controls over what metadata is included (pretty much all or nothing) and lets you apply Lightroom 2’s super simplistic watermark.

Under Post-Processing if you choose “Show in Explorer” it will open up the window so you don’t even have to go searching for your image.

Now you have exported an edited and complete image! The Export module is extremely important because how else are you easily going to share your images with the world? Upload it to Flickr, Facebook, Picasa or any number of photography communities and share away. Next time we’ll discuss saving export presets and some shortcuts to getting those images online.