# Workflow Using Lightroom and Photoshop Elements



## MPRamsey (Dec 29, 2011)

I am fairly new to Lightroom (3 months) and love it!  I recently  purchased Photoshop Elements and am learning it.  However, I have a  workflow question.  I use Lightroom as my photo manager and import all  of my photos/videos into it.  I recently took a series of family  portraits and integrated Elements into my already established workflow  with Lightroom.  However, I have found a flaw in the workflow I just  tried with integrating Elements.  Here is my general flow:
- Import photos from card to Lightroom (DNG format)
- Photo management (delete, rate, flag, etc)
- Lightroom modifications (crop, lighting correction, sharpen, lens correction, etc)
- Export DNG of Lightroom corrected photo (*_edit.dng)
- Open *_edit.dng with Elements and make other necessary changes.
- Save as PSD file (*_edit.psd)
- Import PSD file into Lightroom for publishing.

The glaring flaw  in this workflow is that if there is something that I missed doing in  Lightroom (say a brush I applied is not quite correct and needs  adjustment), I have to go back to the DNG I edited in Lightroom prior to  exporting for Elements editing.  Then I must repeat all of the Elements  modifications I made to the Lightroom corrected photo.
As you can  see, I need help establishing a Lightroom/Elements workflow whereby I  can make Lightroom AND Elements modifications freely to a single photo  at anytime without losing modifications I made from one or the other.   Can anyone suggest a workflow?

Thanks,
Michael


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## b_gossweiler (Dec 29, 2011)

Michael,

You can skip the step of exporting/importing as follows:

After you're done with your work in LR, you right-click the image and choose "Edit in Adobe Photoshop Elements". You'll then be prompted to enter the file type and attributes to be passed to PSE. People these days choose TIFF more than PSD, as TIFF has no disadvantages to it vs. PSD. I would choose ProPhoto RGB as the color space. You can also choose to have the derivate TIFF file stacked with your original.

Then, when you're done in PSE, you just Save the TIFF altered in PSE and you'll return to LR with the TIFF already imported into your catalog.

Beat

Edit:

Since you "bake" your LR changes into the TIFF when going into PSE, further work (upon return from PSE) has to be done on the TIFF, in order to not loose the work done in PSE. The DNG no longer represents your base.


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## MPRamsey (Dec 29, 2011)

Thanks Beat!  That does eliminate a few steps.  However, it appears then that there is no way, after LR and PSE edits, of making further LR adjustments to the existing LR modifications (such as to reduce the Brightness of an applied brush)...correct?  I must make further LR corrections from the flattened TIFF file that has lost all of the Raw file characteristics.

I have followed the new workflow and it it does flow better.  I am disappointed that there is no way of freely moving back and forth between LR and PSE to make further changes to a single file...seems like a flaw of the design of the Adobe suite specifically LR and PSE.
I did run into something quite annoying....when I make further modifications to the TIFF in Lightroom, after each modification, LR has to re-load the image to apply the modification.  So you get this "loading...." affect where the image goes away and then re-appears with the modification.  :disgusted:

Moral of the story is to make absolutely sure you have completed ALL of your LR modifications before making final modifications in PSE.
Thanks,
Michael


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## b_gossweiler (Dec 29, 2011)

MPRamsey said:


> Moral of the story is to make absolutely sure you  have completed ALL of your LR modifications before making final  modifications in PSE.


Exactly !



MPRamsey said:


> However, it appears then that there is no way, after LR and PSE edits, of making further LR adjustments to the existing LR modifications (such as to reduce the Brightness of an applied brush)...correct?  I must make further LR corrections from the flattened TIFF file that has lost all of the Raw file characteristics. ...
> 
> I am disappointed that there is no way of freely moving back and forth  between LR and PSE to make further changes to a single file...seems like  a flaw of the design of the Adobe suite specifically LR and PSE. ...


Unfortunately, there is not, and that's a technical restriction. In order to apply pixel-based editing, the parametric edits done in LR have to be calculated into the TIFF (rendered), and from then on there is no way to change the "underlying" edits anymore.



MPRamsey said:


> I did run into something quite annoying....when I make further modifications to the TIFF in Lightroom, after each modification, LR has to re-load the image to apply the modification.  So you get this "loading...." affect where the image goes away and then re-appears with the modification.  :disgusted:


This is a known bug related to having "Automatically write changes into XMP" active (see here). Do you have this option enabled?

Beat


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## clee01l (Dec 29, 2011)

> Unfortunately, there is not, and that's a technical restriction. In order to apply pixel-based editing, the parametric edits done in LR have to be calculated into the TIFF (rendered), and from then on there is no way to change the "underlying" edits anymore.


When the Edited TIFF is returned to LR, you can apply additional LR adjustments to it.  This is not optimum for processing and you can not have the same degree of control over the adjustment as you can with the Original RAW file.  And you still need to export the adjusted TIFF to see the results outside of LR.  However, this is no different from importing a JPEG and making adjustments to the already edited (by the camera) JPEG. 

There are only three reasons I can see for even needing pixel Editing in PSE after LR.  These are HDR, Panoramas and the need for a layered image.  You should be able to manage all of your image adjustments inside of LR  with the exception of the three cases that I mentioned.


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## Stenis (Dec 9, 2012)

clee01l said:


> When the Edited TIFF is returned to LR, you can apply additional LR adjustments to it.  This is not optimum for processing and you can not have the same degree of control over the adjustment as you can with the Original RAW file.  And you still need to export the adjusted TIFF to see the results outside of LR.  However, this is no different from importing a JPEG and making adjustments to the already edited (by the camera) JPEG.
> 
> There are only three reasons I can see for even needing pixel Editing in PSE after LR.  These are HDR, Panoramas and the need for a layered image.  You should be able to manage all of your image adjustments inside of LR  with the exception of the three cases that I mentioned.



I have used Lightroom since version 1.0 and I stopped use Elements when it still was in version 4 (it's 11 now) because I didn't like to lose quality at repeated saves. Lightroom solved all that with it's metadatadatabase from the very beginning. It stores all changes to the picture as metadata in it's own metadatadatabase wether the files are RAW or JPEG. 

I have recently experienced that the Adobe programs now intergrate to a certain extent and that's fine. In version LR 4.2 it's possible to open a picture with Elements 10 with all the changes made to it in Lightroom (if we please) and that's sufficient in most cases I believe. But  I guess what I'm really is waiting for is the complete integration of the Elements tools as a plug in to Lightroom, so these also saves their changes as metadata direct into the LR database. Using XMP side car files is a pretty cumbersome workaround that should be reserved to situations when there are no other alternatives, like with RAW-files (except DNG which is a XMP-compatible RAW-format made to store metadata direct in the file). Why can't we get a possibility to chose wether to use an LR database or the one in Camera RAW when we configure Elements. It works now to polish a file a little extra in Elements but it's not a good solution since part of the changes never will be recorded in the database. I don't understand why Adobe can't use one single type of database for all the picture editing applications like Lightroom, Photoshop and Elements. That just has to happen in the future.


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## Victoria Bampton (Dec 10, 2012)

Hi Stenis, welcome to the forum!  Being able to use pixel editors like Photoshop and Lightroom and just save the changes as metadata would certainly be wonderful, but I think you'll be waiting for a long time for that to be possible (at which point the tools will likely be directly in LR anyway).  But it sounds like you're perhaps meaning the ACR dialog in Elements?  Why would you use that instead of using LR directly?


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## Stenis (Dec 12, 2012)

Victoria Bampton said:


> Hi Stenis, welcome to the forum!  Being able to use pixel editors like Photoshop and Lightroom and just save the changes as metadata would certainly be wonderful, but I think you'll be waiting for a long time for that to be possible (at which point the tools will likely be directly in LR anyway).  But it sounds like you're perhaps meaning the ACR dialog in Elements?  Why would you use that instead of using LR directly?



Hi Victoria, thank you for the warm welcome, you brittons are generelly very polite and I have to say we swedes often pay a little to little attention to these sides of life . 
Sorry if you find us a little bit corse and blunt some times.  

When it comes to the subject I guess you are right, it will probably take a while before the integration gets better than it is.
Reading a few of the other postings I don't get why we shall involve TIFF at all in the workflow as a general solution.
Adobe and others (like the norwegian company FotoWare that sells the DAM (Digital Asset Management) -software with the same name (yes it is spelled that way) has done a lot with DNG-workflows last year.
In Lightroom 4.x we now have fastload options and in the DNG Converter we can select to addfast load data.
In Lightroom we can always chose to update previews and the metadata directly to our DNG-originals without the need for a regular export.

DNG can also hold the preview in full size if you please witch gives a possibility to store both RAW-data, your developed JPEG and your metadata in one single file.
I think this is one of the underestimated characteristics and benefits he DNG file format offers.
I also suggest that it's best to live in Lightroom as far as possible. 
We have seen quite a few quite big leaps in picture quality from version 2.x to 3.x and now to 4.x, at least with Sony ARW RAW-files.
I think it's better to do what you can do in LR and than tweek a few things you can't do in LR in for example Element and accept that you might need to export another LPEG file to Elements once in a while.
In professional workflows with FotoWare it's possible to automate the extraction of the embedded JPEG in the DNG-file and process it according to for example the content in some of your metadata.
DNG is still very underestimated.

Stenis


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## Victoria Bampton (Dec 12, 2012)

Yes, that would certainly be a very interesting option Stenis.  The file size would end up basically the same as a DNG+TIFF, but a single package including all that data could be easier to manage.


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## palengh (Apr 3, 2018)

Stenis said:


> Adobe and others (like the norwegian company FotoWare that sells the DAM (Digital Asset Management) -software with the same name (yes it is spelled that way) has done a lot with DNG-workflows last year.
> In professional workflows with FotoWare it's possible to automate the extraction of the embedded JPEG in the DNG-file and process it according to for example the content in some of your metadata.
> Stenis


Stenis!
I found this post and want to know more about Fotoware workflows and the use of Lightroom?
We use FotoWeb, and have more LR licenses than FotoStation licenses, so I am looking for an opportunity to use LR to change metadata, as we all use LR anyway. 

Any help or advice would be very much appreciated. 

Pål Engh
NORWAY


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


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