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Image Compatibility with Lightroom

Lesson 3 from: Troubleshooting Adobe Photoshop

Ben Willmore

Image Compatibility with Lightroom

Lesson 3 from: Troubleshooting Adobe Photoshop

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

3. Image Compatibility with Lightroom

Lesson Info

Image Compatibility with Lightroom

All right, if you happen to use Photoshop with Adobe Lightroom, like I do, I use Adobe Lightroom to organize my pictures, there'll be certain pictures that you find will not be able to show up in Lightroom, and there are a couple reasons why that might happen. The first one is if you use certain file formats, and here I'm gonna see if I can find "File Handling Preferences." There is a setting in here called Maximize Compatibility For PSD and PSB files. That means Photoshop file format. I have this set to "Always." If you ever have this set to "Never," the all the pictures you save in Photoshop file format will not be recognizable by Adobe Lightroom. Why is that? Because if you have a layered file, Lightroom doesn't understand what layers are. It doesn't know how to read the individual layers that make up your image, and if this is set to "Never," then whenever you save a layered file in Photoshop file format, then it's gonna save only the individual layers. When you set this to "Always...

," it saves not only the individual layers, but it saves a secondary version of the image that has been flattened and has no layers, and therefore, other programs that do not understand how to read the layers can read that flattened version of the picture, but it's only gonna be saved with the file if this is set to "Always." So if you use Lightroom and Photoshop together, I would suggest you go to your file handling preferences and turn that on. The other reason why a file might not appear in Lightroom is if you use the PSB file format. PSB is Photoshop's large document file format. That's what you have to use if your file size goes above the limit of the Photoshop file format, which I believe is two terabytes in size. So if you have a file size larger than that, you won't be able to use Photoshop file format, and you might switch to PSB. Well, Lightroom doesn't support PSB files. I do end up with files that are that big because I do really complex images, but those can't show up in Lightroom. So how can I get them to show up in Lightroom? Well, if you create a brand new file of the exact same size as one of those PSB files, then you can go to the file menu in Photoshop... See if I can find this... And there's a choice called "Place Linked." And you could feed this newly created file, that has the same width and height as the PSB file. If you choose Place Linked, and you feed it the PSB file, it will put it in this document as a smart object. Then save this as a Photoshop file format image, and it will be a dramatically smaller file size because it won't include the individual layers that make up the PSB file, and you'll still be able to load it into Lightroom. So you'll end up with two images: the PSB that you need because you have a huge file, and then that file placed as a smart object, saved in Photoshop file format, and that one, Lightroom will be able to load. You only need to do that if you make extremely large images, which I very frequently do.

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