# Lightroom 5 and Portrait Pro 12. Trying to set up



## SuzyK (Jun 5, 2015)

Hi, new to this forum. New to Portrait pro. New to external Plug-ins.  Yikes.  
Purchased Portrait Pro Studio Max last night and excited to get it running. I purchased the 64 bit version for Mac after making sure my Mac OSX is 64 bit compatible. this morning I went to set up in LR and in the LR pref box for external editors is doesn't allow for a 64bit version. It has 8bit and 16bit options.  Did I mess up? Should I have checked to be sure that my LR version was 64 bit compatible?  (I'm not completely sure what that even means but I know the bigger, the better the data right???)  Can I use the PP 64 bit version with Lightroom 5 16 Bit version?  Do I just choose 16 bit under the "additional external editor", "bit depth" box?  
Also, when setting up an external ed in LR such as PP, would I choose 240 dpi ?  Would I choose compression? LZW? Zip?   I really want to get this thing going but am afraid I've messed up already.  Help!!  :(


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## clee01l (Jun 5, 2015)

Welcome to the forum. You haven't messed anything up.  Operating systems are 32 and 64 bit.  The number is an indicator of how much data that can be pushed through the processor in one chunk  Therefore 64 bit systems are able to process more data than a 32 bit system in the same amount of time.  OS X has been a 64 bit OS since at least version 10.7.  Only the older Macs are not capable of running a 64 bit OS.

The 8-bit and 16 bit refers to the color depth. 16 bit has more available colors than 8 bit.   JPEGs are  always 8 bit color.  TIFFs can be 8, 16 or 32 bit color.  If you shoot RAW, then you want to process at 16 bit.  Otherwise you are throwing away some of the subtle colors recorded by the camera sensor.   If you shoot JPEG you are throwing away some of the subtle colors recorded by the sensor before you let the camera save the processed image. JPEGs are alway limited to 8 bit color.  The benefits of process in an 8 bit JPEG at 16 bits are marginal. 

A DPI setting is only meaningful if you are printing "dots" to paper (where inches are relevant.) You can ignore the  DPI value until you get to needing a print  The 240 DPI is a fine place holder.  It is the height and width measured in pixels that is important when you come to quality prints. 

TIFF files can be compressed losslessly meaning the pixels values can be compacted and when re-expanded you get back the same pixel values as were in the original.  This gives you a smaller file size (in Megabytes) JPEGs are always compressed but the algorithm uses is "lossy",  Meaning the colors are not quite the san decompressed as the color pixels that went into the compression.  i.e. there is always some data loss when your file is a JPEG.


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## SuzyK (Jun 5, 2015)

*Thanks soo much!!!*



clee01l said:


> Welcome to the forum. You haven't messed anything up.  Operating systems are 32 and 64 bit.  The number is an indicator of how much data that can be pushed through the processor in one chunk  Therefore 64 bit systems are able to process more data than a 32 bit system in the same amount of time.  OS X has been a 64 bit OS since at least version 10.7.  Only the older Macs are not capable of running a 64 bit OS.
> 
> The 8-bit and 16 bit refers to the color depth. 16 bit has more available colors than 8 bit.   JPEGs are  always 8 bit color.  TIFFs can be 8, 16 or 32 bit color.  If you shoot RAW, then you want to process at 16 bit.  Otherwise you are throwing away some of the subtle colors recorded by the camera sensor.   If you shoot JPEG you are throwing away some of the subtle colors recorded by the sensor before you let the camera save the processed image. JPEGs are alway limited to 8 bit color.  The benefits of process in an 8 bit JPEG at 16 bits are marginal.
> 
> ...




Thanks so much!  That was really clear.  I'll go ahead and set up. I'm comfortable with LR manipulations and am learning every day. Since I'm training myself, I'm a little slow on the computer tech.  Like I said.. Learning every day!! You've been a great help. Excited to be part of the forum.

Suzy


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