In our last blog post, we discussed how to add external editors to Lightroom Classic, but we ended with a few questions: What if you want to change the file name to identify each editor? Or perhaps you wanted the edited photos to be stored in a different folder? Or what if you need to pass a video to some video editing software? Lightroom’s External Editor preferences don’t allow you to handle these scenarios, but there is another option… Export Presets.
I’m sure you’re already familiar with the Export dialog, so we won’t go through what all of the different settings do. However, there are a few options to look out for when passing photos to other editors:
Export Location
- External Editor presets always place the edited photo in the same folder as the original. The Export dialog allows you to choose a specific location for the edited photos, or to put the photos in a subfolder. This is useful if you like to keep your edited files separate from the originals.
- If you check Add to This Catalog, the photo is added to the catalog, just like an External Editor preset.
File Renaming
- External editors all share the same filename template, which adds -Edit to the end of the filename by default. The Export dialog, on the other hand, allows you to use a different filename template for each Export Preset, so you might have Filename-Topaz.tif and Filename-Nik.tif.
File Settings
- Just like an External Editor, you can select the file type, color space and bit depth. We discussed these options in the last blog post.
Image Sizing, Sharpening, Metadata & Watermarking
- You’ll usually leave Resize to Fit unchecked when passing a photo to other editing software, so you retain all of the available pixels.
- If you’re passing the photo over for additional editing, you won’t want to apply Output Sharpening or Watermarking.
- In most cases, you’ll want to retain All Metadata.
- If you’re adding the photo back into your catalog, you’ll generally want to check Write Keywords as a Lightroom hierarchy. One word of warning… if your parent keywords have Include on Export unchecked, they won’t be included in the exported photo and therefore be added back into your keyword hierarchy correctly.
Post-Processing
- The key to using Export Presets to pass photos to other editing software is the After Export pop-up. Select Open in Other Application, then click Browse (Windows) / Choose (Mac) and navigate to the program exe file (Windows) / app (Mac). Once Lightroom has created the exported file, it passes it over to the software you’ve selected.
Save the Preset
- Once you’ve selected your settings, save the preset by clicking the Add button in the bottom left corner of the Export dialog, and giving it a sensible name. Here’s a sample preset I created for Topaz Studio…
- Having created the preset, you don’t need to return to the Export dialog every time you need to use it. Simply right-click on the photo and choose Export > your preset name.
Open Directly
But what if you want to pass the original file to other software? Perhaps you need to pass a video to video editing software. Or maybe you want to pass a raw file over to another raw processor.
You could set the File Format to Original and use the same kind of Export settings we’ve used above, but the downside is that Export has to create an additional copy of the photo or video on the hard drive.
You could right-click on the photo/video and select Show in Explorer (Windows) / Show in Finder (Mac) and then open it into the software of your choice.
The other option is the Open Directly plug-in created by John Beardsworth. Found under File menu (or Library menu) > Plug-in Extras, it does exactly as the name suggests. It passes the original file directly to the software of your choice, without creating a duplicate file.
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This is a great solution for naming files differently for different editors as posted in the forums recently. But curious if there is any downside to using this method of invoking an external editor versus the “Edit In” functionality which I currently use for PS and the Nik suite. Many thanks!
(Other than not being able to open the original file without creating a duplicate as highlighted above and I guess not being able to open as a Smart Object in PS)
The main downside that comes to mind is the photos rely on metadata that can be saved to the file, so may be missing flags, collection membership and the keyword hierarchy, whereas the Edit in functionality may be able to retain some of that because Lightroom’s in full control.
Thanks for this information.
Is there any way to make the exported file automatically part of a/the stack?
Never mind. I’m just blind enough to not see the stack checkbox. 🙁
Happens to us all! The stack checkbox is only clickable when the photos are being saved to the same folder.