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Jackiedaw
Jackiedaw
Participant
February 28, 2024
Question

Does exporting from Lightroom to Photoshop change photo format ?

  • February 28, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 198 views

Hey

 

I use Lightroom in order to cull through my photos and when I always manually copied those that remained into my other folder and opened them directly in Photoshop. I always did this out of fear that opening from Lightroom into Photoshop, or at least anyhow altering the photos in Lightroom itself - even if I just crop them - will take away their ‘RAW’ format and the photo itself will have much less data later on during actual edit in Photoshop ? Can anybody tell me if that’s the case, as I’d love to crop them in Lightroom and then edit in Photoshop without the fear I’m gonna lose the ‘rawness’ of the photo. I heard it somewhere back in the day and that’s how I operated since.

 

Best
Kay

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Mark.Dahm
Community Manager
Mark.DahmCommunity Manager
Community Manager
February 28, 2024

@Jackiedaw ,

 

There are two distinct Lightroom applications for desktops, and they work similarly.

 

"Adobe LIghtroom CC" has a built in command that you can access if you right click on any image: "Send to Photoshop". Sending a file over in this way will send over a TIFF file to Photoshop, effectively 'burning in' ACR adjustments. Your document will open as a normal pixel layer in Photoshop, and any changes you make there will effectively be in addition to the burned in adjustments you made in Lightroom.

 

But you can also right click and use the "Export > Original + Settings" command, which will open in Photoshop as a RAW image, using Photoshop's Adobe Camera Raw plugin; this plugin will let you modify the images using the same command set available in Photoshop, but changes can be saved back to the file, that you can re-importe into Lightroom as a new asset, and all the adjustments will be unified. 

 

 

"Adobe Lightroom Classic" has a command for Export that will let you Export to DNG, and that will also preserve the Lightroom edits which can be modified in the Adobe Camera Raw plugin in Photoshop.

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