Saving in Lightroom

gwendolyn · May 2, 2008

I just got lightroom and I'm so confused! :scratch I just want to know how to save an image. Once I make changes (edit) a photo, how do I make sure the changes are saved? Do I need to use the export feature?

I noticed I can save the whole catalog. Will the changes I make change in elements.

Sorry if I'm being stupid. This program is making me feel dumb and frustrated. :cry

Pilznr · May 2, 2008

Don't be frustrated. You'll get used to it, and then you'll love it.

Yes, you do have to use the export feature. You can install a plugin for LR that uploads directly to SmugMug or other various photo sharing websites. Here's the thread... http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=76934

Let me know if you need more help, but I'm not a pro at it yet. You can probably find anything by searching for lightroom on DGrin.

arodney · May 2, 2008

gwendolyn wrote:

I just got lightroom and I'm so confused! I just want to know how to save an image.

It auto saves all your work. There's nothing to "save" although at some point, if you wish to EXPORT a rendered image outside of LR (to use in say Photoshop) you use the export command or Edit in External editor. But short of that, everything you do is auto saved.

jfriend · May 2, 2008

gwendolyn wrote:

I just got lightroom and I'm so confused! I just want to know how to save an image. Once I make changes (edit) a photo, how do I make sure the changes are saved? Do I need to use the export feature?

I noticed I can save the whole catalog. Will the changes I make change in elements.

Sorry if I'm being stupid. This program is making me feel dumb and frustrated. :cry

Lightroom has no traditional save for your edits. When you make a change to the image, that change is automatically saved. It's also forever undoable (kin the history list for that particular image) so there was no reason to really ask you if you want to save the change or not.

Another place that Lightroom is different than most other editors is that the change you make is not actually applied to your original image. Instead, it's stored as an edit instruction in the catalog and then on-the-fly applied to the image when viewing it. That's why it's infinitely undoable because they just save the list of editing instructions and apply them to your original.

This does mean a couple of important things though. If you want to take an edited image outside of Lightroom, you have to "render" an actual set of pixels with those edits to it. In Lightroom, they call that exporting the image. You select the image you want to export, hit File/Export, choose your file destination and any other options you care about and Lightroom takes your original, makes a copy, applies all your edits to that and creates a JPEG/TIFF with your edits applied. You can then take that image to any other program, email, web upload, Smugmug, etc... since it's now just a normal JPEG/TIFF with edits applied.

The organizing parts of Lightroom and Elements have little to do with one-another. The catalog in Lightroom is completely different than the organizer in Elements. When you edit something in Lightroom, you won't see that edit in the Elements organizer.

You can, however, open an image in Lightroom, make some edits to it, then open that image in Elements. When you do that Lightroom makes a copy of the image with edits applied and then passes that new copy of the image to the Elements image editor where you then edit like any other JPEG in Elements. After editing in Elements, you can "re-import" into Lightroom so the newly edited version would be in the Lightroom catalog if you want.

Saving in Lightroom

Comments