Exporting is proving a head scratcher

[Alfisti]

Hi, I ran a search here and on google but I cannot seem to isolate the problem i am experiencing with exporting. Truth be told I have many issues but for now I will stick to just one.

I have an action in CS3 that I have saved as a droplet and it does this .......

- re-size, sharpen, change to 8 bit and save as JPG

My Export options are .......

- 16 bit tiff, no sharpening, save to same folder as original (nowhere to disable saving?), run Droplet action.

Now what happens is, Lightroom seems to save a copy of the file as a tiff without the droplet changes (like sharpening). Then CS3 opens the file and runs the action but it cannot save the file because "it is already in use".

I am really lost, I feel like I am missing something because surely LR is designed to work in unison with CS3 or the option to use a droplet would not be there.

How does LR know not to save the file and to leave it to CS3 because it is in the action?

 

[Kiwigeoff]

Welcome, to help us help you could you please take a moment to fill in your signature in the "userCP' that is found in the nav-bar at the top left of the page - thanks.
Now what are you wanting to achieve in the end? It seems that all the things you are doing in PS, sharpening, resize,8bit, jpeg, can all be done directly with an LR export.

 

[Alfisti]

Welcome, to help us help you could you please take a moment to fill in your signature in the "userCP' that is found in the nav-bar at the top left of the page - thanks.
Now what are you wanting to achieve in the end? It seems that all the things you are doing in PS, sharpening, resize,8bit, jpeg, can all be done directly with an LR export.

All filled out. My concern with doing everything in LR is that I'd prefer to use the sharpening options in CS3. Ideally i'd like to batch images by making a duplicate, save one for web and one for print with different extensions. Not sure if I can do that with one image in one step or if I need to export twice.

 

[Kiwigeoff]

You could do it either way, still seems a lot of effort to me. the sharpening in LR is pretty good now, have you tried the export sharpening and compared on the web or with actual prints as a comparison?
You could of course export and use actions/scripts in PS.....

 

[Alfisti]

You could of course export and use actions/scripts in PS.....

I am still lost, if this is the case then why does LR give the option to run an action using the droplet feature? I still don't see why LR saves a copy of the image as well as proceeding witht he action in a new file, it just seem slike odd behaviour considering it look slike it was designed to work with Photoshop.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

There's 2 slightly different things at work here Alfisti (and welcome from me too!)

Droplets were originally designed to literally drop a stack of files directly onto, and have them run a batch process, without having to go into the batch dialog.

Lightroom makes use of that by simply exporting the files and then passing the list of the files to the droplet, to run as a Photoshop batch process. That's where the interim file is coming from.

Then let's go back a step... how are you setting up your action and droplet? And are you wanting to run this on batches of images, or single images? And while we're there, are you starting with Jpeg or raw images, as there may be a quicker solution for you.

 

[Alfisti]

There's 2 slightly different things at work here Alfisti (and welcome from me too!)

Droplets were originally designed to literally drop a stack of files directly onto, and have them run a batch process, without having to go into the batch dialog.

Lightroom makes use of that by simply exporting the files and then passing the list of the files to the droplet, to run as a Photoshop batch process. That's where the interim file is coming from.

Then let's go back a step... how are you setting up your action and droplet? And are you wanting to run this on batches of images, or single images? And while we're there, are you starting with Jpeg or raw images, as there may be a quicker solution for you.

Thanks for the warm welcome, I hope to contribute once I am more familiar with the software.

I was going to take this one step at a time but now that you've asked, well here is what I want ideally ......

I bought LR because previously I was forced to go through the entire image creation process whereas with LR I can do the editing then hopefully batch the annoying bits like re-sizingf and saving when i have great cklumps of images (see gallery for travel photos).

This is the work flow i would like .....

- Open RAW in LR, develop but no sharpening or re-sizing

- Batch process images to create one 12''*18'' image for print and one 53' pixel high (landscape) for web image

- sharpen both (using different sharpening settings)

- Convert to JPG

- Save to same folder using a suffix

Sounds simple but for the utter life of me I just cannot do it. I am happy to do this twice if I have to, once for print sized images and once for web ....... but even that is beyond me.

The other odd issue I have always had with CS3 is that no matter what I try, as soon as I attempt to batch process CS3 keeps asking me to specify an extension. How, for the love of god how?

Cheers.

 

[Denis Pagé]

Don't know about your CS3 problems but ALL the steps above can easily be done within Lightroom!... I saw nothing specific to need a pixel pusher application like CS3 in your previous messages. So, I wonder why you are insisting on using it first.

 

[Alfisti]

I am not so much insisting as figure LR cannot do both re-sizes at once (could be wrong) and LR's sharpening appears a tad agricultural (no option for radius or fase or anything else, just a scale).

Otherwise yeah, I can just export using LR easily enough.

BTW what is your chosen motorsport? Bit of a motorhead myself.

Don't know about your CS3 problems but ALL the steps above can easily be done within Lightroom!... I saw nothing specific to need a pixel pusher application like CS3 in your previous messages. So, I wonder why you are insisting on using it first.

 

[Denis Pagé]

...BTW what is your chosen motorsport? Bit of a motorhead myself.

Let me check... 2514 photos of Japanese drift racing photos in my Catalog...

Back to the topic at hand, why do you think Lightroom's sharpenig is agricultural... :roll: I get quite good results as many others...

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Agricultural sharpening? That's a new one. Thanks for the smile!

Ok, LR's sharpening is really pretty good, so I would suggest having a good play with it. It'd save you some headaches, if you do decide you like it. You can set the first batch processing, and immediately set the second batch running, and they will quite happily run concurrently.

But back to the question.

For a start, I'd skip the Tiff personally. If you're doing a single resave on a high quality file, you're not going to lose anything worth having in a real world environment.

I'd do LR export to full resolution jpg then PS action which runs:
Resize to 18''x12''
Sharpen
Save As Jpeg, don't change the name, do change the location and set the quality
Select first history state
Resize to 53'px
Sharpen
Save As Jpeg, don't change the name, do change the location and set the quality (or maybe even Save for Web to keep the file size down)
Close without saving

When you create the droplet, you can choose Destination None. You won't be able to add a filename suffix in that process.

You could then rename the files from the 2 different folders and combine them into 1 folder, and delete the original full res folder.

Sounding like hassle?

With your batch process asking for an extension, is it actually an extension it's asking for, or a jpeg quality rating? Screenshot of the action and the droplet dialog would probably do the trick.

Another option for you to consider, while we're trying to confuse you... LR2/Mogrify. Very neat export plugin, would do what you're asking without introducing Photoshop.