Transportable Lightroom Adjustments

Posted by Philip in Photo Processing

I love Lightroom.  I can do 95% of my photo adjustments in it.  But the one thing I’ve had issue with is transportability of the adjustments.  I don’t always want to open Lightroom to quickly look through photos or to export a jpg from one of my RAW files.  Bridge is great for that sort of thing and I don’t have to keep a massive library of all of my photos.  But there’s one trick (setting) you have to do in Lightroom to make you adjustments visible to external applications like Bridge.

Go to your Catalog Settings under the Metadata section and turn on “Automatically write changes to XMP.”  This will write any adjustments you make to the .xmp sidecar file but more importantly if you convert your RAW files to .dng, it’ll write that data to the actual file.  This way Bridge will see all of those adjustments with out having to Open Lightroom.  I’m amazed that this setting isn’t on by default, it doesn’t take hardly any extra time and it ensures that any adjustment I make stays with the file, even if I want to open a file I adjusted on the desktop from the laptop.

Selective Coloring

Posted by Philip in Photo Processing

Two ways to perform a selective color, one in Photoshop and one in Lightroom.  This isn’t necessarily just bringing out a single color against a black and white image but making a single object pop against a muted background.