Wrong working directory for Save As when using Edit As Layers in Photoshop

[TomFidd]

To reproduce:

1. Pick a couple images in an LR Classic folder and use right-click Edit In>Open As Layers in Photoshop

2. Save As... the stack as a PSD

3. Exit PS

4. Back in LR, switch to a different folder

5. Again pick a couple images and Open As Layers in Photoshop

6. Save As... the stack

At this point, the Save As... operation starts in the working directory from the last operation (step 2). In other words, it's offering to save files from \x\ in \y\. This is annoying, because you then have to return to LR to determine what folder the files really originated in, and then navigate to that location in the PS save dialog.

Obviously it would be OK if you were still working in the same folder, but in real-world editing it's almost always a bad choice. For example, today I edited a stack of layers from \2022-06-29\ (using the common YYYY-MM-DD directory pattern), and PS offered to save them in \2022-05-30\ which is the last location I worked in.

Perhaps you could argue that this is merely an unfortunate design choice, but I think it's worse than that. Not only does it differ from the behavior of most applications (where it's rare to Save As... a file to a working directory other than the file's original directory), but it differs from PS' own behavior when editing single files (Edit In>Edit In Photoshop 2022...). If the user doesn't notice the discrepancy, it's likely to be hard to find the edited stack later, because it'll be in a different folder than the sources.

Bottom line: the default working directory for Save As... following an Edit as Layers operation should be the same as the source images in the stack. (There might be rare cases where images come from different folders, but in that case the default location should still correspond with one of the images, not some random location from previous activity.)

[JohanElzenga]

Bottom line: do not use 'Save as' for images sent from Lightroom to Photoshop. Simply use 'Save'. That is what Lightroom expects you to do and what the routines are written for.

[TomFidd]

You're right - thanks!

However, this still seems like a UI mistake. For example, if I open a raw file, xyz.orf via >Edit in Photoshop, the resulting tab name is just that - xyz.orf. Normally a save on a file is a (potentially) destructive operation, so no one in their right mind would save edits into a raw file. This is asking people to do something they've spent years learning not to do on most systems.

Plus, how hard can it really be to set the cwd correctly when launching an edit?

[GoldingD]

Wrong

When you send a RAW file to Photoshop from lightroom Classic. That is Edit in Photoshop, The RAW gets opened by Adobe Camera RAW (this step will appear to be skipped if LrC and PS are close enough in version and the Camera RAW plugin used by PS is also current) and passed onto PS. Yes you will see the RAW file listed up in the tab. But NO, you will not be editing the actual RAW file. Actually you are editing a temporary raster file (at that time in CACHE). The Close/Save/Save As/ action will commit those edits to the raster file, baking them in. End result a raster file, typically TIFF or PSD. Not a RAW file.

[TomFidd]

Nothing you said actually contradicts anything I said. Obviously you're not editing the raw file. I think everyone who knows what a raw file is knows that. But that's not the point.

The point is that, in basically every application on every OS, "Save" means "commit the edits to the open file" and the open file's name is shown in the title bar or in this case a tab. So PS is giving the user a cue that they're about to do something that would frequently be very bad. In addition, the cue is misleading in that the tab displays .ORF (or whatever) when in fact the Save will create a .PSD. This is just sloppy UI design.

The cwd behavior is even dumber. Let's say I open a stack in myLRlib\2022\2022-09-06. If I then Save the result, I get myLRlib\2022\2022-09-06\targetfile.PSD, which is correct. If instead I choose Save As because I want to modify the filename, I should get the same directory I'd get if I did a Save, because that's how a Save As works almost everywhere in the universe. But no, I get something completely useless like myLRlib\2022\2022-08-17. Admittedly, this would make sense if I always wanted to Save As to some default location like \Pictures, but I'm pretty sure that's rare.