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rus5
rus5
Known Participant
October 25, 2020
Question

Lightroom Export to Photoshop - Preferences

  • October 25, 2020
  • 3 replies
  • 1329 views

In Lightroom Classic there is a preference section covering exporting images to Photoshop for editing.  It includes bit depth, color space and so forth.  This catagory doesn't appear in Lightroom preferences.  Does anyone know what happens when exporting to Photoshop ?  Specifically, how are bit depth and color space handled ?

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3 replies

JohanElzenga
Community Expert
JohanElzengaCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 26, 2020

I finally got a chance to try it myself, and I agree with Jao that the tiff must have been rendered by Lightroom. I can confirm that when the image comes into Photoshop, the file name already has a tiff extension. And when I change my ACR preferences to AdobeRGB and 8 bits, the image that comes in is still ProPhotoRGB and 16 bits.

 

That means this did not come from ACR, it came from Lightroom. Interestingly enough, Lighroom does not save the tiff to its catalog yet (before it's saved by Photoshop). That is what LrC does in case it needs to render the image because of a version mismatch.

 

-- Johan W. Elzenga
rus5
rus5Author
Known Participant
October 26, 2020

Wow, that's just amazing.  I just tried the same thing again and I'm getting exactly the opposite results just like before.  A .nef file sent to PS from LR gets sRGB and 8-bits when I set CR to that, and ProPhotoRGB and 16-bits when I set CR to that.  And a tiff does not appear in LR.  So everything in my case is coming from CR.  How can we be getting totally different results ?

 

I guess it doesn't really matter since what I want IS ProPhotoRGB and 16-bits so I'm leaving CR set to that.  I'd just like to understand what's going on at this point.  Anyway, thanks Johan and Jao for your help.

J
Community Expert
Jao vdLCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 27, 2020

Very strange. What version of Lightroom are you on? The latest version of Lightroom Cloudy is 4.0. There were some recent changes in how this is done I believe so perhaps you are still on an older version.

J
Community Expert
Jao vdLCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 25, 2020

Edit in Photoshop when called from Cloudy Lightroom opens as a 16-bit prophotoRGB tiff. You can't change that setting. It appears to not go through camera raw but render it using Lightroom itself and open the tiff file directly.

JohanElzenga
Community Expert
JohanElzengaCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 25, 2020

Thanks Jao, that is useful information. By the way, you can check if the image is rendered by Lightroom or by ACR in the following way. Send the image from Lightroom to Photoshop, then do not save it yet. Switch over to Lightroom. Do you see the TIFF image even though you did not save anything in Photoshop yet? Then it was rendered by Lightroom.

 

-- Johan W. Elzenga
J
Community Expert
Jao vdLCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 25, 2020

My observation came from the filename that it comes into Photoshop with. It already has the .tif name. From Classic, you first see the raw file extension. Also when the tif file is in Photoshop opened from Lightroom Cloudy, you can right click on the title and do a reveal in Finder (on a Mac at least) and you will see an actual tif file already rendered that was opened for editing in Photoshop. 

 

That it doesn't get added immediately and only after daving from Photoshop I think is to prevent the image from getting uploaded to the cloud twice and not a sign that camera raw is used. These files get very big.

JohanElzenga
Community Expert
JohanElzengaCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 25, 2020

What stops you from trying yourself? You seem to have Lightroom installed, otherwise you wouldn't know what the preferences do or don't have for this option. Export an image to Photoshop and have a look at the bit depth and the color space...

 

-- Johan W. Elzenga
rus5
rus5Author
Known Participant
October 25, 2020

Hi Johan,

 

Thanks for the reply.

 

Well of course I can do that and when I do, not surprisingly, the image has the characteristics that are default for CR/Photoshop.  But what happened before PS ?  Did it arrive as say 8-bit sRGB and then PS changed it but only while it's in PS ?  What happens when PS saves it back to LR ?  Does LR change it back to sRGB and 8-bit ?  LR doesn't provide image characteristics information as far as I can see.  Definitely not in its simple "info" window.  My camera takes 14-bit Adobe RGB images.  Are they being saved as something else in LR and then in Adobe Cloud ?

 

There must be a reason LR Classic has those options and LR doesn't.  Since Adobe doesn't bother to provide a proper manual for their products and the "Help" option is absolutely useless I don't know how else to understand this other than to hope to reach an expert on this forum.

JohanElzenga
Community Expert
JohanElzengaCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 25, 2020

The way that Lightroom Classic does this is that it does not convert the image, but instructs Photoshop to open the raw file with the Lightroom settings. These settings include the color space and bit depth. That means that the image is actually converted by Camera Raw, not by Lightroom, but the Camera Raw dialog is suppressed and the ACR preferences are overruled. The only exception to this is when there is a version mismatch between Lightroom Classic and Camera Raw. In that case you get a dialog where you can choose: render the image in Lightroom, or open it anyway (in ACR).

 

I don't know if Lightroom desktop uses the same procedure, or if it renders the image itself and then sends it to Photoshop. You can try that out by changing the ACR preferences and then sending the raw image from Lightroom to Photoshop again. If you get the same image, then apparently it is Lightroom that decides this. If the image changes to the color space and bits depth you now have set in ACR, then ACR is used to render the image and only the Lightroom develop settings are used, but preferences settings like color space and bit depth are taken from ACR.

 

By the way: Your camera does not take 14 bits AdobeRGB images. It takes 14 bits raw images and raw does not have a color profile because it is not yet a color image. What you set in your camera (sRGB or AdobeRGB) only applies to in-camera jpegs and previews, it does not affect the raw files.

 

-- Johan W. Elzenga
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