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Inspiring
November 11, 2017
Released

P: More Export Formats Besides Jpg of edited photos!

  • November 11, 2017
  • 42 replies
  • 854 views

First off I love Lightroom in all iterations: cc classic and mobile. Now that I do a vast majority of my photography on mobile, The limitation of exporting only unedited originals as DNG is a downer. I edit a large portion of my photos in LR mobile and I’m stuck with a not so awesome JPEG as my only export format. DNG or PNG would be fantastic as it preserves the original oomph of the raw capture and allows for higher quality edits in other apps/programs. (I know HEIC is in the works). Greatly appreciated!

42 replies

Inspiring
September 11, 2018


Please add TIF-Export function to Lightroom on mobile devices. This function is absolutely crutial for using an iPad as your main editing platform.

johna76373788
Known Participant
September 9, 2018
Thanks Victor, Let’s wait and see, cheers
Participating Frequently
September 9, 2018
@188115, I agree. I brought up this exact argument here: https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/is-lightroom-cc-a-nonprofessional-version-of-...

Rick did reply that "Adobe has no interest in preventing us from using other software", but I seriously doubt that from a business perspective.

I'd be ok with a "CC walled garden" assuming any upcoming future Photoshop for iOS isn't going to be seriously crippled, much like Lightroom for iOS is in many regards (panoramas? sync adjustments between multiple images? etc.).
johna76373788
Known Participant
September 9, 2018
The fact that IOS is already exporting uncompressed files when editing in other Adobe products means that they are keeping clients within the adobe product space, which makes perfect sense from a business perspective. If adobe could offer a full or close to full functioning photoshop, it wouldn’t matter for most, as long as the option is there.

95% of all my edits are completed in lightroom, healing and liquify are also connect to lightroom with FIX, so for those doing things like composites, adobe needs to offer further services. Asking adobe to open up the possibility to allow people to edit in another companies product line will not reap any results. Asking them to provide IOS photoshop is the route to take.

I think for those who are doing a basic level edit in lightroom, then exporting a jpg and importing into affinity to further do a basic level edit in affinity makes absolutely no sense. Choose one or the other, lightroom can now do almost anything to a RAW image outside of the extremes.
Participating Frequently
September 9, 2018
I'm willing to bet that once Adobe brings the full version of Photoshop to iOS[0], you'll be able to exchange lossless image data between Lightroom and Photoshop.

It remains to be seen if we'll have the ability to export into anything other than lossy compressed files from Lightroom or Photoshop to other third party apps. Not having this feature would make a ton of sense if the point of all of this is to lock us into the walled garden.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/13/17567886/ipad-photoshop-release-date-apple-photo-editing-adobe
Participating Frequently
September 9, 2018
Not OP, but I'm in the same situation and I use Affinity for the same reasons people use Photoshop. There's more to postprocessing than RAW adjustments, compositing for example.

Affinity can indeed read almost any type of image file. But while it can also do ACR-like adjustments, I find that Adobe's solution is superior.
johna76373788
Known Participant
September 8, 2018
Thanks for the feedback. For sure, you wouldn’t want to edit a jpg 8bit lossy compressesd file, I totally understand. I’m going to presume a few things. Affinity cannot do what lightroom does? Otherwise you would be editing the RAW from start to finish in affinity with no reason to edit in lightroom? Your obviously doing extreme editing on each image as lightroom mobile has everything one needs for basic to pretty high end editing already? Can affinity read a PNG file?

If so have you tried exporting out of lightroom mobile with the uncompressed PNG file and working on it in affinity? On my iPad Pro it only takes about 10seconds to create the PNG in lightroom mobile before exporting as original.

I haven’t yet got the full specs on the generated PNG file, but from what I can see and have played around with, it’s most certainly a uncompressed file.
Inspiring
September 8, 2018
Simple example : let’s say I open a photograph with Lightroom, apply noise reduction, lens corrections, geometry corrections, and a few other tweaks like global exposure.
If I then share the image from Lightroom and open it with affinity, it is saved as a jpeg image by Lightroom and opened as is by affinity. Which means : compression artifacts have been added (8-bit color which can cause banding on skies for example, plus a general loss of sharpness, even with a jpeg 100% quality).
In affinity, when working on the image, let’s say I end up modifying the contrast of some parts of the sky : and oh no ! The banding artifacts all of a sudden become clearly visible (by reducing colors to 8 bits, jpeg loses a lot of color gradient information, on a finished image it is not really a problem since your eye cannot really see the difference, but on an image you want to edit further it definitely is because your editing could worsen the effect).
And that’s only one example out of many in which compression artifacts can cause problems with further editing.
So it’s obvious it’s not possible to make pro quality editing work with a jpeg as a start image, but it would be if only TIFF 16-bit for example was available as an export option from Lightroom.
johna76373788
Known Participant
September 8, 2018
Thanks for the comment, agreed, serious flaws in app features. Where you wrote “at some stage have a problem with incoming image being a jpeg” , can you alaborate in what situation are you referring to, so I can get an idea of your workflow. Apparently Affinty doesn’t have batch export? If not, that would be a big problem for me. I also think one of the biggest issues is getting your catalog and images off your iPad keeping your xmp data with your RAWs, so when archived away, at any stage you could opening it all up again on whatever device you like and have edits intact. The only option currently is back onto desktop through the cloud.
Inspiring
September 8, 2018
Nice hacks John, but for me the problem is still there and painful. My main editing application is affinity and it will stay as is, what I wanted to do is add Lightroom mobile to the workflow before affinity, as it’s got a ton of qualities to prepare and cleanup raw images : I do think both can be associated successfully.
However this is impossible because Lightroom mobile does not permit export of high quality images.
And I’m definitely not the only one in that situation, anytime you want to place Lightroom mobile before something else you will at some stage have a problem with the incoming image being a jpeg (this also applies to photoshop fix).
And as Victor says, I want to stay in the mobile space. That’s the point of Lightroom « mobile » is it not ?