P: TIFF compression settings have no effect when Lightroom sends image to Photoshop for editing

[noalorama5]

Hello, I believe this is a bug..When using edit in Photoshop from Lightroom with TIFF format set, none of the compression settings work. Because when the file is saved in Photoshop (ctrl+s) and comes back to Lightroom it's always an uncompressed TIFF. Every other setting works.Unfortunately I can't tell whether the fault is on Lightroom or Photoshop side..Tested on Win 7 - 64bit with LR 3.6 - 64bit and PS CS5.1 - 64bit, also on Win XP - 32bit LR 3.5, PS CS5. (In both cases camera raw version match) Lightroom 4 behaves the same.I would appreciate your replies, Thank you

[DHill]

Just a follow-up: how are plans to deal with this progressing???

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I am also wondering about this, the compression option is still not working with current versions of Lightroom and Photoshop CC. Any news?

[katad0t1s_1]

It's now 2016 and the bug is still there. Worst part is that most people, are unaware of the issue and waste hdd space by having uncompressed files.

 How far is your office exactly??? 

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Just chiming in on this one. Every picture I work and save with ctrl - s takes 1 GB of both main drive and backup. I am too lazy to Save As, select compression and then re import into Lightroom. Still, 100 edited photos is 100 GB of disk space. It could be a third if this worked.

[Per Berntsen]

+1

[Todd Shaner]

LR CC 2015.8 on Windows 7....it's a mystery why LR TIFF ZIP is significantly smaller than PS TIFF ZIP....it's not due to metadata differences as far as I can see!

[Kroeker Photo]

+1 This is ridiculous, and the only reason this hasn't been fixed is that the majority of PS/LR users don't know anything about computers, haven't bothered to check the file sizes and don't know it's an issue.  This has been a KNOWN ISSUE for 5 YEARS. Fix your broken software Adobe. 
...Or should I send you the bill for all my extra hard drives?

[LRuser24]

As documented in the LR help for the external editing settings, LZW compression is not possible for 16 bit TIFF files. However, that is not 100% correctly "enforced" by the preferences dialog.What is correctly handled: When switching from 8 bit to 16 bit, an entry "LZW" is removed from the "compression" drop-down menu and if "LZW" was previously selected, it is replaced by "None".What is not correctly handled: If the preferences dialog is opened with bit depth already set to 16, the "compression" drop-down menu still contains the entry "LZW", and it is selectable. However, when "LZW" is selected then, and the preferences dialog is closed using "OK", the compression setting saved is actually "None", which is also visible the next time the preferences dialog is opened.Not a big deal, but one can accidentally use "LZW" for 16 Bit and end up with no compression at all - without any indication that "LZW" was not a valid choice.Applies for both "Edit in PS" and "Additional external editor". LR 4.3 64 Bit, Win 7.

[brkorb]

"Me, too!!" This sort of thing is commonly called a "Misfeature" and needs to be fixed.

[simonsaith]

"However, that is not 100% correctly "enforced" by the preferences dialog." This part of the bug has been fixed in in Lr 6.9 or 6.8 as I remember.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

It's unbelievable that this remains broken.  I have a note taped to my monitor to re-save folders of TIFF images nightly using the Automate->Batch function of Photoshop, but boy is that a pain in the ass.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Lightroom CC 2015 & Photoshop CC 2014

I've set in LR: Preferences - External Editing -> Photoshop CC -> Compression TIFF 16bit to ZIP.
Inside LR when choosing to edit a file in PS and saving that file after I've edited, no compression is applied to the TIFF file. The result is always an uncompressed TIFF file.
Which makes the LR preference setting completely useless.

[wfroyce]

See the following link: https://petapixel.com/2020/04/13/this-lightroom-bug-could-be-costing-you-tons-of-storage-space/
 April 13, 2020 I just tried this.  Set the Lr Classic CC external editing preferences for Adobe Ps CC to TIFF with compression None.  and then set compression to ZIP.  In both cases the resultant TIF was the same size.  Both my Lr and Ps are up to date.  Why no compression?

[Bob Somrak]

This not being fixed after 8 years is beyond ridiculous.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

For large files that use multiple Smart Objects and occupy around 2 GB on disk, I'm seeing a space saving of 500MB or more. But it is simply not practical for me to open up every image I ever saved as TIFF in PS and save it again by compressing to ZIP, so I'm wondering if it can be scripted. FWIW, I'm running latest macOS and PS. I know how to find TIFF files that are larger than a threshold value (say 500 MB) using a script, but I don't know how to "resave" them using the same script.

[john beardsworth]

Do you really mean a "script"? If so, in PS, create an "action" to run that script and save the action as a "droplet" from the File > Automate menu. This file can be treated by LR as an external editor, so you select affected TIFs in LR and edit with the droplet.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

How did you automate the re-save, that’s exactly what I’m looking for.

[Earth Oliver]

Use Image Processor Pro + Bridge.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

@john beardsworth

I did what you suggested, but finding the files to resave took some command-line foo as LR doesn't have a query option by file size.

find . -type f -size +100M -name '*tif' -mtime +15 -print0 
  | xargs -0 stat -f "%z %Sm %N" -t "%Y%m%d" 
  | sort -k1rn -k2rn

(Line breaks are shown for legibility only)

The above command finds all files with the extension tif that are larger than 100 MB and not modified in the last 15 days. It then sorts them by size and then by date. Using this command, I was able to find all the images on the disk, and then I simply found them in LR by searching by the names.

[john beardsworth]

OK, that's finding them, though you could always sort using my Search and Replace plugin, and doesn't do the updating.

Take a look at these rough screenshots at https://www.dropbox.com/s/xebqmvhvyafgvkd/droplet-setup.jpg?dl=0 . In PS, you create an action like the one in the top screenshot. Then use PS's File > Automate  > Create Droplet with the settings shown - the droplet/action can be named/stored as you want, but be careful on the right hand side.

With the droplet created, you can either drag photos onto it using Finder and wait while PS runs the droplet, or set the droplet as an external editor in LR and choose pics from there, editing the original when you're asked to choose.

Test on a couple of items first.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Version 9.3, an update to Lightroom Classic, went live on June 15, 2020 and contains a fix for this issue. Please install the update and respond back if it does not cure the issue for you. Thank you for your patience!

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Can you elaborate? Do we not need to use "Save As" anymore while saving a file exported from LR? What does simply saving a file do after the fix?

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Can you elaborate? Do we not need to use "Save As" anymore while saving a file exported from LR? What does simply saving a file do after the fix?

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Lol at "thank you for your patience" on a fix for an eight-year-old bug.

[Todd Shaner]

Rikk, using LR 9.3 the issue appears to be fixed on my Windows 10 system.

However, I'm still seeing an unexplained difference in the LR Export file size using ZIP compression. I mentioned it in the reply here:

https://console.getsatisfaction.com/photoshop_family/conversations/lightroom_tiff_compression_settin...




ProPhoto RGB 16 bit with ZIP compression was used for all three of the above files. The LR Export Metadata panel was set to include 'All Metadata' and no options checked to remove data. That's a 9 MB difference, which as I mentioned is not likely due to differences in LR and PS metadata. Using ExifTool the LR Edit in PS and Export file metadata is 12 KB and the PS Save As ZIP file 14 KB.

I did a compare of the files using PS Apply Image as outlined at the below link. Skip page 1 and follow the procedure as outlined in pages 2 and 3.

http://www.digitaldog.net/files/Apply_Image.pdf

I used a Levels Adjustment layer set to 126 and 129 with the 'Apply Image' file. The results are shown below with LR Edit in PS and PS Save As ZIP showing no difference in the Histogram. The second compare for LR Export with ZIP and PS Save As ZIP shows differences in the histogram. Clearly there is something different with the LR Export with ZIP function. Since the file size is significantly smaller this is most likely due to compression artifacts.

Even though the differences are small it begs the question of why. It should be fairly simple to find out why and fix it. I checked Camera Raw 12.3 Save & Convert with the same export settings and it exhibits a similar smaller file size (108,101 KB). Please let me know if you need further information.