P: Support cataloging PNG files in Lightroom

I am putting together some web pages in LR's web module. When importing sources in PSD format, 1 layer with transparency, LR treats the transparent edge as opaque - it makes it white.

I thought I could get around that by saving the file as PNG (as I'd had no problem with a transparent identity plate in PNG format) but was shocked to see LR wouldn't import those.

I shoot RAW and don't generate things in PNG except for the web, but I would like to see both support in LR for transparent edges in PSD files and PNG. In the web module in particular, having the ability to deal with transparency (so things merge easily with the page background color) is important.

Just a personal opinion here, but if Lightroom recognizes it (e.g. Panel End Marks and Identity Plates (specifically PNG,GIF, and BMP files are legal)), consideration should be given to managing these. The watermark editor also recognizes PNG. It seems a pity not to be able to manage watermark graphical files as well.

I must say that I found Lightroom's lack of support for png files remarkable. I am using LR as my primary cataloging program, and I generated literally thousands of pngs as stand-in files to allow key-word indexing of unscanned slides. (How do you catalog your unscanned slides?)

Anyway, it was easy enough to switch to jpegs for my needs, but since code to read and write pngs is so available, and it is one of the file types that supports xmp metadata internally, the decision to not support them in LR seems absurd.

That said, the lack of support for png's does not get in the way of my use of the program, and one can always convert png's to tiff's without loss if one needs to catalog or edit a particular image. So I hesitate to vote for adding pngs if doing it would distract Adobe from working on more important improvements to LR.

That might be enough, it depends on your needs. If you just want to catalogue things, that's fine, but if you don't want to store a JPEG copy of each image or if you want to use them in the Develop module, something more is needed. Mine translates images on the fly at the filesystem level, so LR believes it's reading a TIFF.

Anyway, if cataloging is enough then that's grand, problem solved 🙂

There's already a plug-in called AnyFile that adds any type of file to a catalogue.

Hi,

OK, I'll stick this on the list of stuff to do. I'm pretty much swamped right now but I'll get round to it at some point. Maybe Adobe will add it to LR natively in the meantime ;)

Cheers,
Jim

A lot of open source, or shareware programs generate PNG files because libpng is a convenient way to output losslessly compressed files without some of the issues of TIFF. I know lightroom is targeted at DSLR files, but some of us merge our DSLR images with other graphics, and want to have the two in the same catalog.

Hi,

I've already got a plugin for loading JPEG2000 files into Lightroom (Windows only, I'm afraid). If there's enough interest I could do a PNG version too - let me know.

Cheers,
Jim

With more interest in panos and the resulting large file sizes, I would appreciate very much Adobe's incorporating psb as a supported file format in a future version of Lightroom.