History State ?

[poaceae]

I imported a RAW image into LR, processed it, exported it as a jpeg, and sent it to a folder outside of LR. When I imported it back to LR there were no history (other than import). Do I lose the history states if I don't use the LR catalog or am I just not looking in the right place?

 

[Denis Pagé]

Welcome to Lightroom Forums John!

As it is looking from your question that you are not only new here but also beginning with Lightroom I will suggest you to go through The Starter Kit when you have a moment...

Now to your immediate problem: It is quite normal that the JPEG you exported doesn't contain any history as this image never existed before! By exporting, you just created it. When you imported your raw image, Lightroom just kept a pointer of where it is on disk and noted that in its database. When you tweaked it, it wrote the steps in its database. At that time it wasn't able to write whatever to the not yet existing JPEG!... After reimporting the JPEG, Lightroom can track what you do with it in its history but that would be a bad idea of mixing what you did on the raw with what you do on the JPEG in my opinion.

If you looked more closely to the dialog box when you exported, you would find a checkbox to automatically add the exported image to the calalog rather than manually reimport. Most users generally export the JPEGS, do whatever they wanted to do with them as upload or mail etc., and then trash them as you can recreate them on demand from the original raw.

 

[poaceae]

Thanks for the info Denis.