This isn't all about Lightroom, you know

The previous posts have been about lightroom, my favourite photo software, but there's more to editing than lightroom (allegedly). Some people actually use other software and find it useful.

Any jesting aside, sometimes there are edits that just can't be done in lightroom or not done easily. One example of which is if you need the functionality of layers and their blending modes. If you need this, external editing software is required. There is a plugin available for lightroom, which gives this functionality, called perfect layers, from OnOne software, but I've not tried it out, so I can't recommend or otherwise the software.


As we're on the subject of layers and blending modes, when would you use them as a lightroom user? Well, I have no idea as I don't know your images. I know that if I need them, it's when I've been shooting multiple exposures with the camera in one spot and want to put them all together into just one image. such as the one below:

 Is it really so long since I made this? Wow, this was made in 2008.

Anyway, if you need to do something like this and have an image editor on your computer, then ensuring it is set up in your lightroom preferences means you can definitely get to edit your images very easily.
Press ctrl-, (the control key and the comma key) or cmd-, for those with apples to bring up the preferences dialogue and select the External Editing tab.
Once there, the following settings worked well for CS4:

File Format: PSD
Color Space: ProPhoto RGB
Bit Depth: 8 bits/component
Resolution: 300

This saves you ending up with massive tiff files which were a real pain for storage until I found out how to change the settings.

Happy playing in LR and other editing programmes
Matt