Copying multiple raw edits?

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
May 14, 2022
2 replies
1170 views

I am attempting this in Camera RAW but it perhaps might be a task better suited to Lightroom. Here is the predicament I am in.

I have a lot of pictures. They are DNG's. I finished editing them and then I put them through Image Processor Pro (Third Party Plug-In for easier batch editing). After I finished, I noticed that I had left a box ticked that saved over the DNG. Luckily, I had embedded the RAW files into the DNG's. So I extracted them.

Now, I want to copy the settings I used for my edits, and it seems that I can only select settings from one RAW file, and apply that across the board to the new photos. Is there a way to copy each and every individual setting that was used in the original set, to the new set, without going through them one by one? For clarity, I understand you can copy paste settings, I know how to do that, but it only takes ONE "batch" of settings; and applies it to all the photos. I can work with doing it one by one, as it's only a relatively small set of affected files. I'm just wondering if there's a better way to do this.

Windows

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TheDigitalDog

Inspiring

Yes, you can copy and paste parametric settings (edits) from DNG/raw to DNG/raw.

Yes, Lightroom Classic might be a better approach if you want to apply this to the same 'original' as Lightroom Classic supports Virtual Copies. So you could have one DNG and 40 variations of edits (if that's the goal).

Author “Color Management for Photographers" & "Photoshop CC Color Management/pluralsight"

Kjohn1993Author

Participant

I feel like you guys aren't understanding my question and are just using this as an opportunity to promote Lightroom. In either case, I fixed it. The question was not...can I do X with Lightroom, or do I need to use ACR. Or ; Can I have 40 copies of the same picture.

All I wanted was to copy the same edits I made to the original - these edits all have different settings. To a different batch. When you select "Copy Settings" or "Sync Settings" it uses the SAME SETTINGS for the last selected image and applies them to the ENTIRE SELECTION. I wanted to use all of the settings that I had individually made, to that newly created batch.

In either case I will look into Lightroom, because it seems that ACR does not have the feature I am looking for, apparently, neither does Lightroom, at least not that you guys will tell me.

Kjohn1993Author

Participant

Here is a nice little picture to demonstrate what I wanted. Yes I understand I could have done this with lightroom, but I did not use Lightroom to do the edits, so there's no history for me to go back to. I do not want to for lack of better words upload personal [removed by moderator] images to a cloud service. I wanted to copy my edits as I had intended, and not just use the same singular setting across the board because of a mistake I had made.

D Fosse

Community Expert

You can't "save over" a raw file. The image itself, the sensor data, is never changed. Only the settings are saved, but that's just metadata as lines of text.

So you didn't need to extract, you could just reset the settings, and the file would be returned to pristine state. But as for your specific situation, where you want to go back to previous settings, but not all the way back to zero - you can do that in Lightroom. It has a History panel where you can go back to any state, even after closing and reopening the application. I use ACR so infrequently that I don't know if it has this feature too.

In a DNG, that metadata is saved in the file header. In a proprietary raw file (nef, cr3, arw etc), settings are saved as an accompanying sidecar file. But still just lines of text. So yes, in that sense a dng is saved over when settings are changed. But that doesn't mean the image is saved over. It's just the text instructions in the file header.

Kjohn1993Author

Participant

Would that include image size as well? Because I had saved the images as copies in a smaller size. I will look into the Lightroom feature you had mentioned. I went ahead and fixed them in the way I could figure out. I don't use Lightroom really, it seems kind of redundant to ACR when it comes to the things I need it for. I'm also not really comfortable with the idea of uploading all of my images to the cloud.

Kjohn1993Author

Participant

Also just for arguments sake say I won't use it, and in this case, I didn't. Is there or is there not a way to copy multiple/different settings to a new "batch" of the same photo-set. Or do I need to do this all manually?

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