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Exporting from Lightroom Q&A

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Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Exporting Q&A

Exporting Q&A

I am not sure I follow this Export concept. In Photoshop, you just save a photo. How is Export different from Save or Save As in Photoshop?

Once an image is in Lightroom, it is never actually changed at a pixel level, and no layers are added to it. Everything that is done to an image is done by only adding instructions, making the adjustments "nondestructive" in that nothing is actually changed. Small accessory files record the instructions Lightroom automatically creates to accompany the images.

In Adobe Photoshop, on the other hand, as soon as you make adjustments, something changes in that file. Even if you use an adjustment layer, which is nondestructive to pixels, you change that file with that addition of a layer. None of those changes are recorded to the Photoshop file unless you save them.

So, in order to make adjustment instructions in Lightroom "stick" to an image, or become permanent, you have to process the image file and save it as a new file. That is essentially what exporting does. With Photoshop, any changes to the file have already occurred while that image was inside Photoshop, so the file does not need to be processed, only saved. You can simply save the file as it is. It is basically just a difference in the way the two programs handle the preservation of changes in an image.

How much metadata that is already connected with a file can I actually change?

Some metadata, such as Exif data, is embedded with the file as you take the picture. This is camera information and, in general, you cannot change it. Usually, you want this to be consistent so that you know what your camera was or wasn’t doing with a particular shot.

On the other hand, you can change all IPTC data. Lightroom lets you set most of this when you import images into the program. You can then readjust this information with the Metadata control on the right panel. There is a lot there, but rarely do most photographers need it all. Use what is appropriate. If you are changing a lot of IPTC data (besides the caption or description info that is specific to an individual photo), you might reconsider what you are applying to the original photos as they come into Lightroom. You should be able to do quite a bit of this work there.

Where to go from here

For more information about Photoshop Lightroom, see the following:

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