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Lesson Info

Editing Copy in Lightroom

Now, remember, we've already sent a file to Photoshop, we already saved it, we already see it back here in Lightroom. But what if I then decide I wanna make more changes here in Lightroom? So I go and I take that file that is now a layered TIF file, I can see in the upper left corner, you can see the letters TIF tells me it's a TIF, and I head to the develop module. Now, the thing about this is Lightroom doesn't understand how layers work at all and so it's still gonna let me work on the picture even though it doesn't understand what layers are and this image is made out of layers. That's because when we saved it it saved what's known as a flattened version. It's as if you combined all the layers together, it saved one of those as well as the individual layers and Lightroom is just working on the flattened version. Now let's see what could I do to it. Maybe I grab my crop tool and I decide, well, I'm gonna crop this up to here and that looks crooked at the bottom, doesn't it? So if I m...

ove my mouse outside the cropping rectangle I can drag, let's try to kinda straighten here. Alright, and maybe I just don't like my little watermark over there. Do something like that. And then I come down here and maybe I'd like to add some vignetting, where you darken the edges. So I go here to effects, bring this little slider down. And I'm not gonna be careful about the settings here because I'm just showing you kind of an FYI we could make these additional changes. I'm gonna make it just so they're visually obvious. Therefore, you can tell if they're still there or not. Okay, so now we go back and in fact, let's make even more changes. Let's come up here and make the thing, let's say I don't like that yellow tinting, let's just make it black and white. Okay, now let's go back to the library and you can see my end result sitting there. Now here's the hard part. What if now I decide I wanna make a change to what I did in Photoshop back when we had layers? So I have this file, that's my layered TIF, I go to the photo menu, I choose edit in, and I choose the exact same command but now this is not a raw file. When it was a raw file, it just opened it. This is a TIF file and that TIF file has had further changes made in a program that doesn't understand what layers are and so this becomes complicated now. Because it just wrote down text that said we cropped it. It wrote down text that said the angle we rotated it to. It wrote down text to say how dark did we make the edges. It's just text associated to that file name. And now we're saying, "Well, go and open that file in Photoshop," and so this comes up. And most people, I find, just choose the top choice and kind of ignore what it says. And in the process they start complaining about how Lightroom and Photoshop work together. And that's because they didn't understand this part and so they just chose the top one and went with it. So let's take a look at this. Notice that the small text on the bottom is important. Do you notice the top one says, "Apply the Lightroom adjustments "to a copy of the file and edit that one." Let's choose that. So applying those Lightroom adjustments means it's gonna crop the picture, it's gonna rotate it, it's gonna add vignetting, and it's gonna make it black and white. But since Lightroom does not understand what layers are, it can't do it with layers like Photoshop would so when I hit edit with that top choice chosen, here we are in Photoshop, look what happened to my layers panel. It had to flatten the image. The only thing that Lightroom can read out of that file is the flattened version. It saved a flattened version, which means no layers, and then the individuals layers as well. Lightroom doesn't know what layers are so it couldn't read that part, it could only read the flattened part. It applied its changes and it opened it. That's not the setting I usually use. So let's close that, don't save it, and let's return to Lightroom. Let's tell it to open that file one more time and this time let's look at these two options. With both of those options, I don't know if you can read it from your distance away, but read the small text. It says, "Lightroom adjustments will not be visible." When it says Lightroom adjustments will not be visible, it means the Lightroom adjustments that were applied after this was in Photoshop at one time. It's not thinking about the original original adjustments that were done to that raw file that's over there, it's thinking about this file. So once that file was created, it had layers, will we see the Lightroom adjustments? I'm gonna choose edit original. That's what I use 98.6% of the time I ever open a layered file in Photoshop. So I'm gonna choose that, I'm gonna hit edit, but it's gonna be a little weird. Think about what we have. We have a layered TIF file and Lightroom is holding instructions that is text that tells it to crop, make black and white, add vignette, right? It's just gonna ignore that text and just open the file. So what we see is exactly what it looked like the last time we had it open in Photoshop and it just ignored the text it was storing that said what you had done afterwards. But don't worry, we're gonna get that text back when we're done. I'm gonna make a visually obvious change to this image. I'll move my logo from the corner it's in to over here. Whoops, if I can, oh, there's one setting that drives me nuts and that is automatically selecting layers when clicking. Adobe made a change to Photoshop a little while ago which made it so your move tool changed the way it worked by default and any time I start a class, I reset my preferences. So we start with defaults and so every time it messes me up. But it's this little icon over here. So anyway, I moved this over. Maybe I'll also get rid of that little photo filter or instead let's change the color that it uses. I'll click on my photo filter adjustment layer, if I double click in the left side, I'm gonna choose a cooling filer instead. Alright, so is that visually obvious? That's the only reason I'm making those changes is so you can see if they show up in Lightroom at any point. I'll close the file, choose save. Now, here's what we got. We told it to edit the original image and if I go back to Lightroom, there's the result, looks just like it did in Photoshop. But something happened, we lost something in the process, didn't we? We lost the cropping, the vignetting, the turning black and white part. It had a text record of what we had done after opening that file in Photoshop and that stuff is now being ignored. It didn't get thrown away though, it's just been ignored 'cause it doesn't know, is that what you wanted or something different? So here's how you can get it back. I'm gonna take that file after going to Photoshop, I'm gonna go to the develop module, I'm gonna go to the left side of my screen, and we're gonna have a list called the history. And it's kind of a weird way they implemented this but if you click on the top most choice in history it will reapply the text that it had stored for that file. It's a weird thing. I wish there was a setting that said automatically do it but there's not that I know of. But do you see it says convert to black and white, post grab vignetting, the cropping rectangle, and the angle and all that stuff is sitting right there. All I need to do is click on that top most choice and now it just reapplied it, okay? Wouldn't it be nice if that was more discoverable, more obvious? Maybe when I came back from Photoshop a little thing came up and said, "Hey, you've made changes to this file earlier, "do you want me to reapply them?" Wouldn't that be nice? But no, that's why I have a job, why you guys come to this. But anyway, we got those changes back. All it did is it took that text that it had stored earlier and said, "Oh, you actually want it applied," and it reapplied it to the image. Just added that metadata to the file. So we can go to Lightroom now and head back to Photoshop. Lightroom, Photoshop, Lightroom, Photoshop, as many times as we want but if we've made additional changes in Lightroom after it became a layered file, we have an additional step. We need to go to our develop module, go to the history, click on that top most step, if you wanna get back the changes. It's a little weird. Now here's something else that's weird and we'll see if it does it or not. In the process of doing that with the history, it's as if we're doing a trick and the rest of Lightroom is not always aware of it. So sometimes you can get what I call a lazy preview which is a preview that doesn't update to reflect that we just did that. Well I'm not sure if it'll happen or not but I'm gonna go to the library module and I would not be surprised if I saw the blue version sitting there instead of this. Ah, it did show up. The last time I demo'd this, what would show up there is as if we never told it in the history to apply those things. And that'll happen on occasion, it's what I call a lazy preview. Usually to fix it what you need to do is zoom up on your picture because when you're viewing the image small like this, it's using the preview that's stored in your Lightroom previews file and it doesn't always realize that additional changes were made. So to zoom up on the file, I type the letter F, F means full screen. And if you need to you can click and that would zoom up to 100%. And that's when in order to view it at that size, it must actually read the original file in to get all that detail and if the preview had not updated that kind of forces it to inspect the file and all the settings being applied but I wanna mention that because just because it worked on my screen doesn't mean it will always work on yours. So we've ended up going to Lightroom, or starting in Lightroom, go to Photoshop, back, and we can go back and forth as many times as we want. Just go over here, edit in, and what I do, I choose the bottom choice. Now there's a middle choice, edit a copy. And it also says, "Lightroom adjustments "will not be visible." When do I use it? When I need more than one version of the file. I have two wedding photos, group shots. One I'm supposed to retouch out the person on the right side of the image and they want also one where I retouch out the person on the left. But it's two versions that they need. So therefore I want a copy so I actually have two files, two TIF files. And so therefore we keep the original one and here we would get an additional one. So maybe I'm gonna make one with my logo on it and one without. But it's not very often I need that so it's rare for me to need that middle option. Instead, the majority of the time I choose the bottom choice, hit edit, I'm gonna see the layered version of the file minus those changes I made in Lightroom. I can make as many changes as I want and then when I'm done I just close it, save it, and when I return to Lightroom, if I don't see the changes I make, what do I do? Develop module, top of the history list, click on that top choice. Okay, so I've done that a few times, hopefully enough to get you to actually get somewhat of a feeling for the process. I wish it was a little bit more streamlined where it would do it for me, there would just be a preference but there's not. Now what do I do with the original file because I said I don't stack it with the original. If you wanna stack things, you're welcome to select more than one image. Like here I have this image, I'll hold shift and get the other one. And I believe you go to the photo menu, there's a choice called stacking, here it says group in a stack. Just so you can see what it looks like. And when I do, you'll only see one picture but you see the number in the corner? It says two. That means there's actually two stacked on top of each other and if you click the number, you expand the stacks and you can see them both. Click the number again, you collapse it. That's what that checkbox would do at the bottom of our preferences that I said I leave off. But a lot of people like that. If you wanna unstack things you can go to the photo menu, choose stacking, and there's unstack. Now they're just separate. So what I do in my organization system is when you look at my folder list, and I just choose a random year, well, let's just go to, might as well go to a recent year. If I go to a year, the way I organize my images, which is not how a lot of people organize things, is I end up making sub-folders. And I don't know if you can read the names from where you are but I have in progress. Those are for images that aren't done yet. So I know when I return to this folder I have one file to still work on. I have outtakes. Those are images that aren't good. They were out of focus, I have a better shot of it, better composition, whatever it is, those are images I don't need to waste my time looking at again. I put them in that sub-folder. And then what I put on the base folder, see there's five of them? That is my finished images. Those are images ready to show the public. I know they're ready to show. I can go to any folder I've ever shot and I can tell you exactly how many pictures I'm ready to show you. In Albuquerque Route 66, there's three of them. In Pecos National Historic place, there's five. And then I create another sub-folder here called support images. These are the originals that got taken into Photoshop and they ended up making a secondary file that's a TIF. And these are the original ones, this is where I put them. And therefore my base folder never gets cluttered up with images that are not ready to show the public. And so that's just personally how I deal with it is I create a sub-folder called support images and that's where I put the originals that eventually became layered TIF files. To create a sub-folder, you right click on a folder and there's generally a choice right here, create folder inside. And then you can type in support images. To move images, just click on an image, drag it to your folder list, and just drag it on top of a folder and it will move it on your hard drive. I didn't mean to move that. So anyway, that's how I deal with it instead of stacking but it's a personal choice so feel free to do whatever you want. The one thing about my organization system is the numbers on the right side I find to be extremely useful so if I look down this folder list I can tell you I've got 16 images from Sante Fe ready to show you. I have two from Palm Springs but I have none from this place and if i open it up I can tell you, well there's only one in progress. Wow, I've worked through that folder, I only have one picture to work on. That tells me that's probably the picture that I need to spend my time on. To me, it really streamlines how I work. But the thing about it is those numbers that show up, the one thing to remember about them is there's a choice under your library menu right here and that affects the numbers. So the number for your base folder where you might see a zero on mine, if that's turned on, the number will include all images from all sub-folders inside of it. So the number will be much higher because it's adding up what's in those sub-folders and that's the one thing, when I bring it up, I get questions constantly about, "My numbers are different," and it's all because you have that turned on and I don't. Also, it feels like when this is turned on, when you move an image from one folder to another, it feels like you duplicated it because you're like wait, I'm still viewing the base folder, I still see the picture, but I dragged it to that other folder and the number went up so I must have duplicated it. No, you're still viewing it 'cause you're viewing sub-folders. So that's the one thing.