George Jardine on Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom and Digital Photography

Photograph © George A. Jardine

I originally created this video series because the workflow is incredibly powerful… once you understand it, and because I really wanted to dig into every nook and cranny of complexity that the basic feature allows. Besides, Lightroom’s integration with Photoshop is only half of the story. In addition to that this series gives you a pretty deep dive on the type of compositing and masking that can only be done in Photoshop, not to mention some basic instruction on using Virtual Copies.

Having said all that, if you are one of the few who will watch these videos all the way through, there are one or two things you might watch out for. One would be that Smart Object layers in PS finally do allow you to link to a raw source file, rather than suffering through the necessity of embedding the entire thing into the RGB file. And in video #6 I take Adobe to task for that shortcoming, so you can ignore that. Linked Smart Objects still don’t solve the fundamental problem of connecting the raw settings stored inside the layer with those stored in the catalog, but for sure that’s a subtlety Adobe will never address.

A much larger problem is a persistent bug that can cause Lightroom to reset an RGB file that has been taken to PS and back. This is one you’re going to have to watch for…. but it’s not fatal. If you do have non-destructive LR settings on top of a layered Photoshop composite file, and you invoke the Edit in Photoshop command for a subsequent round trip edit, Lightroom will sometimes throw away all of your LR settings. If this happens to you all you have to do is go back a step or two in your history to get things back. But it’s a bit random, and incredibly annoying, so watch for that.

Other than those relatively minor caveats, not much has changed in the way the basic integration works since these videos were recorded with PS CS5 and LR3. You’ll note some minor interface changes, but the basic techniques presented in the video still work in Photoshop and Lightroom CC, in exactly the same way.

Finally, this series was never upgraded to HTML5 (it still requires Flash…), and I will apologize for that right up front. So for those of you who don’t have the Flash plug-in installed, or who want downloads for other reasons, just drop me an e-mail, and I’ll send you the download link.

Here’s a direct link to the videos: https://www.mulita.com/training/psi/flash/

And here’s a link to the original purchase page with instructions for the Flash UI, should you need that.

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