November 6, 2007
More drag and drop tips for Lightroom (part 2)
In part 1 of this story, which was published last week, I showed how you could use a drag and drop method to open a photo directly in Photoshop and also how to open as a Smart Object. In this second part we are going to look at drag and drop to a Photoshop droplet and how to link a photo back to a folder view in Bridge.
Drag and drop to a Photoshop droplet
In part 1 we looked at creating a Photoshop droplet for use in the post-processing stage of a Lightroom export. But you can also drag and drop from Lightroom to a Photoshop droplet. The steps suggested here are fairly similar, except you need to pay attention to how the Create Droplet settings are configured.
1. Here is a view of an Action that I created in Photoshop to resize a photo to 10” x 8”, sharpen for print output and save it as a TIFF.
2. After recording the action I went to the File ➯ Automate menu and chose Create Droplet. In the Create Droplet dialog I located the action I had just recorded, specified an output folder to save the processed files to (which I named ‘Output folder’) and saved the Droplet to the Desktop. But there are a couple of important things to point out here. In the Play section I checked Suppress File Open Options Dialogs. Checking this option would prevent the Camera Raw dialog showing each time I processed an image via the droplet. In the Destination section I checked the Override Action “Save As” Commands because the action I was converting to a droplet does indeed contain a Save step at the end and I needed the droplet action to override the save destination contained in the action and use the destination folder I had specified here instead.
3. Once I had set up the Photoshop droplet I was ready to put it to use. I made a selection of photos from the Library module and dragged them across to the 10×8-print droplet.
4. Dragging the photos to the droplet initiated the Photoshop action steps in Photoshop and when this was complete, the output folder contained the processed 10″ x 8″ files.
By the way, I have noticed a possible bug in Photoshop CS3 where if you process photos from Lightroom to a droplet where the Suppress File Open Options Dialogs is checked, this file opening behavior may remain sticky for all photos that you try to open via a drag and drop method – the Camera Raw dialog is bypassed when opening. The only way I know to restore the default behavior is to quit Photoshop and relaunch again. If you are trying to follow the steps outlined in part 1 and are not seeing the Camera Raw dialog, this could be the reason why.
Drag and drop to open a folder in Bridge
1. With Lightroom you are free to organize and sort your photos in lots of different ways that are not directly dependent on knowing how they are organized by the underlying folder structure. For example, here I am looking at a Collection of photos with a common cityscape theme where the photos have all originated from different folders.
2. If I click on the Folder Action arrow in the Metadata panel (circled in step 1 above) this will take me to a Folder view in Lightroom for that particular photo.
3. If you want to see where the photo actually lives at the operating system level, you can choose Photo ➯ Show in Finder, or use Command–R (Mac), Control–R (PC), to reveal the image file in a new finder window.
4. But there is another way, one that allows you to link back to Bridge. You can drag and drop a photo from the content area to a Bridge program alias/shortcut and this will locate the image in the folder it belongs to and display it within a Bridge window.
5. When you do this, it will open the folder the photo belongs to in a new Bridge window and highlight the selected photo.
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The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book by Martin Evening is available from Peachpit, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and all usual bookstore outlets.
Martin Evening has worked on the development of Adobe Photoshop as an alpha tester from the program’s earliest beginnings. The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book describes all of Lightroom’s features in detail, with photographers in mind. Photographers who routinely work with raw (and even jpg & tiff) images will find Lightroom–and The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book–an indispensable tool in their digital darkroom.
Lightroom-news has a free PDF download of Chapter 1. (click here to download-4.6MB PDF).
Free Lightroom 1.1 PDF update
You can also download a free PDF update for the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom book. Go this link for the full instructions on how to access the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book 1.1 update.