Problems with saving from Photoshop to lightroom, the .tif is huge. Is there a workaround?

Thank you so much everone for your help!

I did change to 8-bits and also put together all the photoshop layers to the background layer. Then when I safe to Lightroom it works fine and is only 30 MB. That works for my so far 🙂

Have a good day and stay safe!

Jasmin

"For editing my Foodphotos I import the Photos in Lightroom and then I edit the threshold and do unsharp mask in photoshop. Then I save to Lightroom to do some editing."

If all your doing is applying Unsharp Mask in PS you can do that inside LrC using the Detail panel Sharpening controls. That way you can keep your workflow totally non-destructive and no additional files need to be created.

Concerning the PS edited file not appearing back in LrC how are you getting it from LrC into PS? If using LrC 'Edit in Photoshop' make sure to use 'Save' in PS and not 'Save As.

Raw files are compressed 12 or 14-bit one channel greyscale files, and have a relatively small file size.

Tiff files are 8 or 16-bit three channel RGB files, and will always be much larger than raw files.

Compressed raw files from my 50 megapixel (8256 x 6192 pixels)  camera are around 50 - 60 MB.

An 8-bit uncompressed Tiff with the same dimensions will be 146 MB. and a 16-bit uncompressed Tiff will be twice that – 292 MB.

You can use lossless compression with Tiffs, LZW compression is very effective for 8-bit files, and ZIP compression is used for 16-bit files. The degree of compression will vary with image content. An image with predominantly smooth, flat, or out of focus areas will compress better than an image with lots of busy, sharp detail, or noise.

Note that using LZW compression with 16-bit files will increase the file size, so always use ZIP with 16.bit.

The only downside to using compression is that saving takes longer, especially with 16-bit/ZIP.

In the Lightroom preferences > External editing, you can set compression for Tiffs.

That's not that large for a Tiff. Even PSD files can go to 2GB without requiring a change to .PSB.

I've checked my Tiffs there and there's one that's 1.26Gb, so I'm not sure why something that 400MB isn't working for you.

What are you seeing when you save the file back to Lightroom (I'm assuming Classic here)?

TIF files are large by nature, for sure. In your Lightroom preferences, have you chosen 16-bit or 8-bit? You can probably reduce the size somewhat if you have chosen 16-bit, but other than that about the only other choice would be to choose the option to have the image saved as a JPEG image. Of course, it is always an option to export the finished TIF image from Lightroom as a JPEG and use that file for production purposes.