Move photos between Lightroom Classic and Photoshop

[Lightroom and Photoshop
with Ben Willmore] [Ben Willmore]
Now, let's take a look at when you might need to head out of Lightroom
and into Photoshop. Lightroom is only capable
of so much, and if you want to do something
like add a border around your picture, maybe apply some texture to it,
and sign your name in the lower right corner,
well, if you look in Lightroom, you just won't find
any features for that, and that's because Lightroom
is not going to modify your original file. It stays there
completely unchanged, and it only writes down
what you've done to the image. There's only so much you can do,
and that's the way you're thinking. But Photoshop, on the other hand,
can do just about anything, and in the process of doing so,
it does change your file. And so I want to show you how
you can take your images from Lightroom, send them over
to Photoshop, make some changes,
and get the results to show back up
in Lightroom again, and the whole process,
just how to make it work nicely. Here's an image where I would like
to remove some people. It's a common task—you went
to a touristy location, and what do you expect?
Tourists. So Lightroom has some retouching tools,
but they're mainly designed for getting rid of little specks
in the sky in your image or overly simple retouching,
because Lightroom is going to try to not change the original file
and just kind of keep track of what you did with it
in a way that's easily undoable. Photoshop, on the other hand,
has a multitude of adjustment tools and retouching tools, and we might need it
for an image like this. So to edit this in Photoshop,
I'm going to go to the Photo menu,
I'm going to choose Edit In, and that's where I find
Edit In Photoshop. When I choose that, it's going
to send the file directly over to Photoshop, then to do the retouching,
I'm going to use a tool on the left side of my screen
that's called the Spot Healing Brush, and with that tool, I'm just going
to paint on top of the people. And when I let go,
it should remove them. And I just have to paint over
each one individually. We'll say that we're done for now. To get this back into Lightroom,
I'm just going to go to the File menu and choose Save. It doesn't ask me for any options,
and I can just close the file. Now I head over to Lightroom,
and I see the end result. But it didn't just keep
the end result. If I go back and look
at the thumbnails that are in here, you'll see, actually, two files. One of those files is the original—
it still has the people in it— and the other is the end result
we made in Photoshop. Now, the reason you get two files
is Lightroom is making all of its changes
by just writing down some text about what you've done
to brighten or darken the picture. Photoshop, on the other hand,
actually changed what makes up the image, and because of that,
it couldn't just save it as some notes. It had to save over
the original image, and that's how it usually worked,
but Lightroom said, hey, no way,
we're going to keep the original. And that's just so you can always get back
to the absolute pristine original. You don't have to keep both files—
just click on the original if you'd like, hit delete, and you can say
Delete From Disk, and you'd only have one image. But I usually keep them both—
that way, I can get back to the original or the stuff that I made
in Photoshop. It'll even stack them here
in Lightroom, where you see a number
in the upper left corner— if you click on the number,
it will hide the original, slide it underneath this version
that was made in Lightroom. Click that number again
and it expands it so I can see them both. If I want to make additional changes,
I click on that image again, choose Photo, Edit In, then the same choice we had before,
to send it to Photoshop. But this time it recognizes
that it's not the original that came from my digital camera—
instead, it's a file made in Photoshop,
and so it asks me some options. I always choose the bottom option,
and just click Edit. I'll be right back into Photoshop—
it'll look exactly the same as it did last time I was there. And then only when I'm completely done
working in Photoshop would I think about adjusting
the image using Lightroom. And if that's the way you work,
life will be simple. So now you see how to easily take
an image from Lightroom, send it to Photoshop,
and get the results to show back up in Lightroom again,
and you can go to Photoshop as many times as you'd like—
the process is easy— as long as you use
what we've shown you.