ADVANCED TECHNIQUES - Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3: Streamlining Your Digital Photography Process - page 362

When you use the Edit In… command, Lightroom lists all the external editors you
have coni gured. Select one from the menu, and Lightroom will provide options
for rendering the i le. Click Edit, and Lightroom will hand of the i le to the other
program using the settings you specii ed.

9

Some programs of er dif erent methods of integrating with Lightroom. For
example, when you install Photomatix for Lightroom, you access it from within the
File menu.

File Settings
Lightroom's External Editing Preferences allow you to specify the settings for the
i les that will be created when Lightroom hands of a i le to another program. h e
main considerations are File Format, Color Space, Bit Depth and Resolution. In most
cases, you will also have the option to change these settings during an Edit In session.

I recommend always using tif f or the i le format here. For color space, use Adobe
r gb (1998) for the most l exibility, or ProPhoto to preserve the most color data from
the original capture.

Don't use PSD
From this point forward, I recommend that you don't use psd i les for any of your
layered Photoshop work. Use tif in stead. It provides all the same capabilities as
psd (layers, type, alpha channels, etc.), with a distinct advantage: tif o f ers much
more long-term viability than psd. h e tif f ormat is an open source, industry
standard. It's much more likely that sot ware many years in the future will be able
to read tif i les than psd. psd is proprietary, and in my opinion, outdated, with a
number of programmatic disadvantages to tif .

Color consistency
For the most predictable results, be sure that your Photoshop Color Settings are
set to use the same Working Space as you set in Lightroom's External Editing
preferences.

Bit depth
Whenever possible, I recommend working in 16-bit. More bits means more data
is used to describe the values of the pixels. A 16-bit image provides much more
“headroom” for processing than does an 8-bit image; the data can be manipulated
further before the appearance of the image starts to degrade. An 8-bit i le uses 256
levels of brightness per color channel; a 16-bit i le uses 65,536 levels. 16-bit allows
smoother transitions between colors and reduces the appearance of posterization
where areas of color become solid and transitions become hard-edged.