Edits in Lightroom

gwendolyn

So the editing I make in Lightroom is permanent? Am I like ruining my picture by editing and reseting, editing, and reseting? Does pushing the reset button undo all the changes made and restore to the original photo?

I'm sorry!:dgrin

jfriend

gwendolyn wrote:

So the editing I make in Lightroom is permanent? Am I like ruining my picture by editing and reseting, editing, and reseting? Does pushing the reset button undo all the changes made and restore to the original photo?

I'm sorry!:dgrin

LR never touches your original. Reset gets you back to your original at any time. Clicking on any state in the history list takes you back to that exact edit state forever. The edits are stored only as a series of steps applied to your original that are applied in real-time when you view your image in LR.

This techinque of not actually modifying the original is why you have to export your image whenever you want to use it in another program. That export step is what actually creates a new image with the edits applied that some other program can use.

LiquidAir

gwendolyn wrote:

So the editing I make in Lightroom is permanent? Am I like ruining my picture by editing and reseting, editing, and reseting? Does pushing the reset button undo all the changes made and restore to the original photo?

I'm sorry!:dgrin

As John said, pushing the reset button perfectly restores the original photo. So does undoing all your changes.

One way to think of Lighroom is that every edit you do is essentially a preview (like in Photoshop) rather than an edit. Lighroom is not like Photoshop where the edits are made permenant when you commit the dialog; rather in Lightroom you are always seeing a preview; edits are only made permenant when you export and even then they are only made permenant in the new file rather than the original.

arodney

What you're creating (and editing) is simply metadta (data about data). A text file if you will. For example, when you ask LR or ACR to do some simple capture sharpening, this is what it look like in the XMP file (which you could open in a text editor and alter):

s = {
id = "23877E63-18DE-4BFE-B1E2-01247D07328D",
internalName = "Capture Sharpen 25_1_20_0",
title = "Capture Sharpen 25_1_20_0",
type = "Develop",
value = {
settings = {
EnableDetail = true,
SharpenDetail = 25,
SharpenEdgeMasking = 0,
SharpenRadius = 1,
Sharpness = 25,
},
uuid = "5E9A70A9-4F31-473C-A4BC-55E9669611E7",
},
version = 0,
}

This says essentially, turn sharpening on, set the values to 25/0/1/25/.

This could be instructions for setting vibrance, white balance, essentially any setting in LR. It is truly non destructive editing (you're editing text, on pixels). The instructions are then used to render a pixel based file FROM the Raw data (if done from an existing rendered image, like a TIFF, then its not technically non destructive, the edits are applied from the baked, rendered pixels).