Next Month, I’m Speaking in the UK at “The Photography Show”

It’s the biggest and the best, and I’m super psyched to be speaking there once again. It’s just six weeks away. I have a 20% off discount ticket code you can use (it’s SPKTPS24), but if you’re a working pro, you might be able to get in free (they have some stipulations, but if you meet the requirements, you’re in free). Here’s the link for more details. Hope I see you there!

The iPhone Photography Conference 2024 is Almost Here.

We’re thrilled to bring you a fresh lineup of brand-new sessions for this year, along with cutting-edge iPhone photography techniques and tips that will elevate your iPhone photography experience. It’s a two-day, two-track

Join us for this 2-day extravaganza and capture the extraordinary—same passion, new techniques, and a whole lot of fun! Register early and save $150! More details and tickets (get yours today), at kelbyonelive.com

OK, no football this weekend, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be football food, so…well..there’s that. At least my team is guaranteed not to lose this weekend. Have a great weekend!

-Scott

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First Steps

The first thing you need to do if you want to explore this option is enable syncing between your Lightroom Classic catalog and Lightroom. Luckily, I’ve already covered all the steps to get started syncing between these two apps. You’ll even find in that previously linked tutorial the steps to follow to set up Lightroom on your mobile device. Once you’ve completed those steps you’re ready for the next step.

Sync Photos to Lightroom

The cool part about this aspect of syncing from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom is that it will only upload a smart preview to be stored in the Lightroom cloud and smart previews do not count against your cloud storage limit. This makes it super easy to continue managing your entire photo library in Lightroom Classic, and then only sync certain photos to the Lightroom cloud for sharing purposes without any additional cost. The other cool thing about smart previews is that they are limited to being no more than 2560 pixels on the long side, which makes them plenty large enough for sharing to social media.

Now that you’ve established this synced connection between Lightroom Classic and Lightroom, you can follow all the same steps I outlined for cropping photos to a desired aspect ratio based on the social media destination you are using. The only difference is that instead of exporting them out of Lightroom Classic you simply add them to a synced collection, which automatically uploads the smart preview versions with all Lightroom Classic settings to the Lightroom cloud. Since all the settings are synced as well you can even modify those settings from within Lightroom later if needed.

Share from Lightroom

Once the photo(s) have finished syncing and become available in Lightroom (from either a phone or tablet running iOS or Android), you just select the photo and tap the Share icon to start the sharing process. These screen captures are from Lightroom on an iPhone (apologies if the steps are different on Android, but I welcome any clarity in the comments).

When the sharing options appear, you can tap the settings icon next to Share to… to configure file type, dimensions, image quality, and output sharpening.

Once configured, tap the checkmark to accept those settings and return to sharing options. Now, tap the Share to… icon to access all of the output options. The icons/options that appear will vary with what you have installed on your system.

Long press on the Instagram icon and choose Open in app to get the full Instagram upload experience.

This will send your photo to the Instagram app where you can complete the process just as you would if you had opened Instagram directly and chosen a photo from your camera roll. Your photo is then shared to the world. You can use that same workflow for sharing to other social media platforms, as well as sending as text message or whatever other output options you have on your mobile device. Happy sharing!

The post Another Way to Share to Social Media from Lightroom Classic appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

The workflow for sharing to social media is very similar to the steps I outlined for exporting copies at different print sizes except instead of focusing on print sizes in inches we are concerned about display sizes in pixel dimensions. File type and color space are just as important as when exporting for printing, so we’ll pay attention to those settings as well.

Also, just like when preparing photos for printing the aspect ratio of the photo before you export is also the key to getting the exact pixel dimensions for best display results on your desired social media site, and the specific aspect ratio will vary with each site and possibly with the orientation of your photo (landscape vs. portrait orientation).

Controlling aspect ratio and file size

Instagram, like other social media sites are inundated with a constant stream of new photos, and as they are storing all of those photos take steps to manage that stream of data. The primary means for controlling file sizes in terms of bytes is to set limits on the maximum allowed pixel dimensions of each photo and to use a common means of compressing data in the form of JPG compression. So, in order for us to have our photos look their best in this process it is in our best interest to crop our photos to the desired aspect ratio, then configure the export dialog to resize the pixel dimensions to no more than that maximum dimension, and then reduce the file size by using the JPG file format and a reasonable Quality slider setting to reduce the file size of the exported copy. Here are the steps:

Step One: Crop to the optimal aspect ratio for your social media destination. For most social media sites the optimal image sizes tend to remain constant over time. Sure, they may eventually evolve as screen resolutions evolve, but this happens slowly. Just do a search for “best photo size for [insert social media here]” and you’ll likely find the site in question (in this case Instagram) has published that information.

For Instagram, there are three aspect ratios to consider for sharing photos in regular posts. There’s square (1:1), portrait (4:5), and landscape (1.91:1). An aspect ratio is simply a way of expressing the relationship between the width and height of an image. So, whether your source photo is portrait or landscape to start with, you can choose to crop to any of these three aspect ratios for displaying the photo on Instagram letting your own taste and the content of the photo dictate which aspect ratio you think is best.

For the sake of an example, I’ll use a photo in landscape orientation and crop it to the 1.91:1 aspect ratio to keep it in that orientation. To do that in LrC I’d select the photo and press R to jump to the Crop tool. Then, click the Aspect drop-down menu and choose Enter Custom (assuming you’ve never cropped a photo a 1.91:1 aspect ratio before so it would not show in the list of previous custom aspect ratios). This will open a popup dialog where you enter your desired aspect ratio.

Then, using your own photographic sensibilities, maintain the aspect ratio by ensuring the lock icon is locked, adjust the crop handles to create the best cropped version of your photo. When cropping, I like to press the L key twice to cycle into Lights Out mode to better see the finished version of the crop.

Now wait, you may be thinking that is a pretty severe crop from the original 3:2 aspect ratio, and you’d be right. This is where you need to decide if you want your photo to fill the viewing area on instagram or do you want to have a border around the uncropped photo. There is no one right answer for everyone, and I know plenty of photographers who would not ever crop a photo in post production if it was at all possible to avoid, and that’s fine. I’m not saying you should crop every photo, I’m just showing you how to conform to Instagram’s display size. For the sake of this example I’ll accept the crop and now I’m ready for the next step.

Step Two: Export a copy with the optimal settings for the intended destination. With your cropped (or uncropped) photo selected, click the Export button (File > Export) and configure the Export dialog for location of saved copy, file type, color space, image sizing, and (optional) sharpening. The important settings are choosing JPG for file type, sRGB for color space, and setting the long side to 1080 pixels for landscape and square photos or 1350 pixels for portrait (by setting the long side the short side will be resized proportionally so we don’t have to worry about that).

The one area where there seems to be differences in opinion is the value of the Quality slider for JPG compression. In some simple tests I exported copies at 100 Quality and at 77 and then uploaded to Instagram. The file sizes of the ones at 100 were obviously much larger than the ones at 77 straight out of LrC, but the file size of all the copies I downloaded from Instagram after they went through Instagram’s compression were all the same. I compared the various copies downloaded from Instagram and there were very slight visual differences between the highest quality versions and the lower quality versions, but honestly, I had to look at them at 300% magnification to really see the differences. That said, if Instagram is going to compress them all down to the same size I figure I may as well upload the highest quality I can and let it go. Feel free to do your own tests.

Once you’re happy with the settings for landscape and square photos then I would recommend saving that as a preset for reuse in the future. Then, simply change the setting for the long side to 1350 pixels and save that as a preset for portrait orientation photos. A strong case could be made to only ever export photos cropped to the 4:5 aspect ratio as that makes them display as large as possible in the Instagram feed, and if you want your photos noticed, that can make a difference. You just need to decide a) if you want to crop your photos, and b) what aspect ratio makes the most impact and suits your aesthetic.

We can upload photos through our web browsers directly to Instagram now, so if that suits your workflow, open a web browser, log into Instagram, and upload. That said, with Instagram being primarily designed for mobile consumption, there is an argument to be made that photos uploaded through a mobile device may look better than those uploaded from desktop. You can follow my steps for using a cloud service to easily transfer your exported copies to your mobile device to test that theory, or next week we’ll look at another route for sharing photos from Lightroom Classic. See you then!

The post Sharing to Social Media from Lightroom Classic appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

Before, before we take this Genie out of the bottle, just a quick heads up: I am super excited to be one of the speakers again at the 8th Annual B&H Photo OPTIC conference (called OPTIC 2022 – It’s a conference for outdoor, wildlife, travel photography, and post-processing), and after a couple of years of doing it virtually, this year they are doing a hybrid event where it’s your choice – you can go and be there live in person as it happens at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan, or you can catch the conference online online, but here’s the best part – all you have to do is RSVP and tell ’em you’re coming (and, of course, choose in person or online). Registration is free. That’s it. You’re in. You get access to all the classes and goodies. Boom. Done. You should go RSVP right now (what do you have to lose?) – it’s going to be an incredible event.

OK, onto why I don’t convert my Raw images to DNG:

I’m going to try and keep this as short and sweet as possible, but it’s important to note up front — I’m not telling you-you shouldn’t be converting your RAW files to the DNG format — I’m just telling you I’m not, and I stopped doing it a while back. Here’s why:

Converting to DNG in Lightroom takes time, I don’t get much benefit back from taking that extra time and so for me and my workflow, it just doesn’t make sense.

None of the big three camera makers adopted the .DNG format
Only a handful of smaller companies did, so it never really caught on like it would have if they had all gotten on board. I don’t share files with other users where I need to keep my RAW edits intact when sharing the original RAW file with another user (see this article), so combining the .XMP file and the RAW original into one single file isn’t a benefit to me (I don’t work with XMP files that often to begin with). Plus, if I did convert to DNG for that reason, it takes longer to re-save the entire DNG file over again each time you make a change than it is to just save changes to a .xmp text file, which happens very quickly in comparison. It’s that wasting time thing again.

Am I concerned that one day I won’t be able to open my existing native RAW files created by the camera companies?
Not at all. At the time Adobe created the DNG spec, it was probably a legit concern, but these days a 12-year-old could probably write a RAW converter during study hall, so I don’t sweat it.

I know there are a handful of other pros of using DNG, but there are just as many cons. Maybe more.
I’m happy with where I’m at —  working faster, not wasting time on import converting to DNG, and I still sleep well at night. Something to think about, anyway.

Hope you have a great weekend, and we’ll catch you next week

-Scott

P.S. A few years back, one of my readers, Reid J. Thaler, did a really informative write up on why he doesn’t use DNG, and he posted it as a comment here on the blog. Here’s what he wrote:

FROM REID J. THALER:
I teach Lightroom and few years ago, I put together my own David Letterman style of “The Top Ten Reason Not to Convert Your Images to DNG Files”

1. Precludes you from using OEM software You will never be able to use your camera manufacture’s software again. Ever. Features that are specific to certain cameras (like Nikon’s Active D-Lighting and Picture Control) are not supported in the DNG format. Do you really think that Adobe knows everything that’s in every proprietary RAW file format it supports?

2. Backing up images will take longer In Lightroom, many of the changes you make can be stored in small XMP sidecar files that accompany raw files, and are only a few kilobytes. When you convert to DNG, changes are made directly to the file, so when you back up your images (hopefully daily) the whole file, typically 20 MB or more, needs to be backed up instead of just the small XMP sidecar files.

3. Metadata can’t be read by other software XMP data, including keywords, stars, and metadata that you may have changed in Lightroom is not available if you want to use another program that can read XMP sidecar files but not DNG files.

4. Longer downloading times from your memory card If you convert images to DNG upon importing to Lightroom, processing times increase since Lightroom must import and convert all the files to DNG.

5. File sizes One argument is that DNG file sizes are more efficient and can be up to 20% smaller. In 1956, the first IBM Model 350 hard drive weighed over a ton, cost $329,928 (in 2014 dollars) annually to lease, and stored 3.75 MB of data. It would have taken over 20 of them to hold a single Nikon D810 (36 MP) 14-bit RAW image file. Today, a 3 TB hard drive (formatted) holds the equivalent of 725,333 of the Model 350 hard drive and costs $100. The equivalent storage capacity, using the IBM Model 350 hard drive, would cost $14.9 billion to lease the same capacity (not to mention the 11.6 million square feet to store them, or the cost of electricity to run them. I’m not concerned about the size of native RAW files!

6. Load times DNG files supposedly load faster in the Develop module. With faster processors and Smart Previews, RAW files load very quickly in the Develop module even from an external drive USB 3.0 drive.

7. Ability to read RAW file in the future. One of the other main arguments in favor of converting to DNG files is that if a camera manufacturer stops producing software that can read their RAW files, then their RAW files would be unreadable. I don’t think Nikon, Canon, or Sony are going away anytime soon, and even if they were, you could use their software to read their files. Worst case, you could always convert them to DNG.

8. DNG is not an industry standard, it’s Adobe’s standard. As much as Adobe would love the DNG format to become the industry standard, it’s not. It’s Adobe’s standard. While a few camera manufactures produce camera the shoot DNG file as their native RAW files, most do not. DNG requires a lifelong allegiance to Adobe.

9. Camera brand not easily identified. Converting all your files to DNG makes it harder to quickly identify the camera manufacturer when looking at the file name since the suffix will be a generic DNG, and not one associated with your camera.

10. No obvious benefit. For all the reasons touting the DNG format, perhaps the biggest reason not to convert is that there is no obvious benefit. DNG files don’t contain more information (maybe less), are negligibly smaller, don’t load appreciably faster, take longer to download because the must be converted, and ties you to Adobe forever! They simply are, understandably, a greater benefit to Adobe than you, and have not been embraced as a standard format.

The post Why I Don’t Convert My Raw Images To DNG appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

Adobe Creative Cloud

I assume most people reading this blog are subscribers to one of the Creative Cloud plans, and if so, included with your plan is at least 20GB of cloud storage. Not much, but certainly enough for the occasional JPG you might want to send to someone via email. This also assumes you’ve installed the Creative Cloud application manager, which should create a local folder named Creative Cloud Files, whose contents are kept in-sync with the storage you have in the cloud.

Configure the Export dialog based on the desired file settings, but in the Destination panel, click the Choose button and navigate to that Creative Cloud Files folder on your system. If you’re not sure where that is, open the Creative Cloud Application manager, click on Your Files, then click Open Sync Folder to open your system’s file browser to its location on your drive. I created a subfolder called Email Attachments, but you can use what ever folder name you want.

Once you’ve configured the Destination panel to save the exported copy to your Creative Cloud Files folder, as well as the image specific settings for this export job, click the Add button to save the export settings as a preset you can reuse again the future.

Once that is done, click Export to save the copy to the synced folder. Syncing should be automatic and relatively quick for small JPG files. While that is syncing, open your web browser to https://assets.adobe.com/files (log in, if not already) and then click into the subfolder you created for this type of export.

Click the three dot menu under the photo when you place your cursor over it and choose Get link to open the pop-up for configuring sharing options.

Click the Copy link button to copy the link to that photo to your clipboard. You can now paste that into an email to send to your desired recipient. They won’t need to be logged into an Adobe account to view or download the photo. Keep in mind that this will count toward your total Adobe cloud storage allotment, so be prepared to delete files from that folder after they are no longer needed in the cloud to conserve your storage. For this reason, and others, I prefer to use other cloud storage options.

Other Cloud Services

While the Creative Cloud storage comes with your subscription it may be limited in amount and even functionality. I prefer using a service called Dropbox which functions the same basic way except you can pay for more storage (though they do have free options too). I use the Dropbox Plus subscription at $9.99/month for 2TB of storage because I use it for so much more than just for email attachments. I love how integrated it is into my operating system. OneDrive from Microsoft is another popular option, and if you have an Office subscription you likely have 1TB of OneDrive storage at your disposal. Like Dropbox, OneDrive is a bit more integrated into your operating system and can be better for sharing larger numbers of large files.

Whichever service you use (and there are others too), you would configure the Export dialog the same as I did for Creative Cloud files except you would choose the synced folder for the service you are using instead. When I use Dropbox or OneDrive I also configure the Post-processing section of the Export dialog to Show in Finder/Explorer so that my file browser opens to the export folder at the end of the process where it is easy to right-click the files and grab the share link right from there to paste into an email, text message, or however I am sharing the link.

Whichever option you choose you no longer have to worry about how large your files are when sharing because all the recipient does is click a link and view or download the files directly.

The post Sharing with Cloud Services appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

I’ve found that my sweet spot is a Quality setting of 80 (as seen above) out of 100. That gives me a small file size but still, the quality of the final image looks great, and you don’t see any signs of compression at that high a setting. The size of the JPEG files saved at 100 is more than double what they are at 80. Take a look:

But Drive Space is So Cheap Now!

Well, yes it is still fairly cheap (but not nearly as cheap as it was a year or so ago). So yes it is, but this isn’t just about drive space — this is also about load speeds on the Internet, and smaller files load quicker, so that’s the 2nd consideration.

Anyway, those are the settings I’ve been using for years now, and I’m happy with the results. Hope you found that helpful. Have a great Monday, everybody!

-Scott

The post The Settings I Use When Saving An Image as JPEG appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

Being ready to share your photos implies that you’re done with editing and ready to move to output, so let’s assume your photos are looking their best and ready to go. The reason I’m starting with the Export dialog is that this is where the rubber meets the road, meaning that up until this point all of your edits exist only as instructions waiting to be applied to the source image data and then channeled through whatever output settings your situation requires. The act of exporting is the act of creating copies that bake in your edits as well as conform to the file size, file type, color space, etc., settings you choose for how these copies will be created.

The beauty of Lightroom Classic in this regard is that since the data in your source photos is never changed you can edit to your hearts content, then as needed, export copies with specific settings for a given situation, and continually export new copies based on any future situations that may arise using different settings. For example, you might have one export sharing situation that calls for copies large enough in pixel dimensions for being printed at a given size and another sharing situation that calls for copies small enough in pixel dimension to be easily shared via email and on-screen viewing only. There are many other situations and scenarios that you will face that require changes in file type, pixel dimensions, color space, and so on.

Typically, the first part of sharing from LrC involves creating the copy that will be shared. Once that copy is created your next decision will be the method in which those copies will be shared with the recipient, and we’ll look at those in a future post. For now, back to a few scenarios for configuring the export dialog.

Scenario 1: Creating copies large enough to be printed at a specific size

I’m still a big fan of printing photos, so I’m advocating for this scenario by putting it first. I’ve actually already written an entire blog post devoted to exporting copies at different sizes for print, so head there to see the details and how to configure the export dialog accordingly.

Scenario 2: Creating copies to be sent as an email attachment

Sending a photo or two as an attachment to an email is a tried and true method of sharing with a targeted audience. Due to file size concerns these copies will benefit from being smaller in pixel dimension and more highly compressed than the copies created for printing, and as such, require different settings on the export dialog.

LrC has a built-in function for sending an email right from LrC, but over the years I’ve found that simple command to be a bit flaky and sometimes suffers from changes to operating systems, email clients, and even LrC itself. As such, I wrote a blog post detailing an email workaround that should be more reliable and provide the same results.

As you can see, the export dialog is hugely powerful feature of LrC that can be configured for any situation that your output needs might require. It just may take a bit of experimentation to home in on the specific settings that meet your situations requirements and your taste for quality, but once you find the sweet spot, you save it as an export preset and you are good to go over and over again.

Next week we’ll build on our knowledge of exporting copies to look at various delivery methods for sharing small and large numbers of files.

The post Exploring Ways to Share Photos from Lightroom Classic appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

What is a Publish Service?

You can think of publish services as a form of export. It is a managed form of export, in that it allows you to group photos together (think collections) and publish (export) them to either your hard drive or some online service (Adobe Stock and Flickr by default, but you can add others). Once you’ve gathered the photos together, you click the Publish button and copies are exported based on the settings you configured when you created the publish service in question.

The cool(er) thing about publish services over export is that if you later make a change to one of the photos you originally published, you can easily re-publish that photo with the changes.

I suppose if you like tracking exports for a given purpose, this could also be useful to that end.

I primarily stopped using them years ago because they are essentially locked into the catalog you create them in. Meaning, if you export that catalog, publish services don’t come along for the ride. They do get included in the backup copy, which is more important, but I have found over the years that sometimes it can be helpful to export an entire catalog and leave behind the “cruft” that had built up in the old one. I didn’t want to invest a lot in a service that I might have to start over again later.

Local Hard Drive Service

The more I thought about this long forgotten (to me) part of Lightroom Classic, the more I thought about one way that it could be useful without a big investment, which was to create a local hard drive publish service to a folder in my Dropbox account, and then share that folder with friends and family, as a way to make photos available directly. So I set one up.

Clicking the + sign in the Publish Service panel, I chose Go to Publishing Manager, which opened the aptly named Lightroom Publishing Manager.

If you’ve never set one up before, you can select the existing Hard Drive service, but I clicked Add to create a new one from scratch so you can see those steps.

I suggest giving it a meaningful name, especially as you may decide to create more than one of these.

Once named, the Publishing Manager should remind you of the Export dialog, as it basically has all the same options (that said, you may/will see different options for publishing to Adobe Stock or Flickr or some other service).

Configure those options based on how you want to create these published (exported) copies. In my case, I directed them to a folder within my Dropbox account to facilitate sharing them with friends and family.

Once configured, click Save to seal the deal. Now you have a special type of collection that you can add photos to, and when you are ready, publish to the configured destination. Note, you can right-click that published folder (as it is called) and set it as the Target Collection to make it easy to add photos from other collections or folders.

Once you’ve added the photos, click Publish to let it do the rest.

Time will tell if this really proves to be useful to me and my family, but what I really want to know is, are you using these at all? And if so, how? Please let me know in the comments. Thanks!

The post Do You Use Publish Services? appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

I’m going to simplify what causes the problem, (so no nerding or geeking out over this), but essentially it’s this:

a) Lightroom uses the ProPhoto RGB color space, which is awesome for editing images and making photographic prints, but it can be pretty horrible for viewing images on the Web.

b) Many Web browsers out there use the more limited (color wise) sRGB as their default color space. So, when you upload an image saved with Lightroom’s default ProPhoto RGB space, those browsers can’t display that wide ProPhoto RGB range of rich colors, so to people using those browsers, your images’s color will look washed out and flat. It’s frustrating and heartbreaking, but it’s easy to fix.

You adjust for this problem when you’re saving the file you’re going to share online, so this happens in the Export window.

In that window, down in the File Settings section, all you have to do is to go to the Image Format pop-up menu and choose sRGB (as shown here). That’s it. Now, when you export your photo and share it on Instagram, or Twitter, etc.,, its color will look nearly identical to how the image looked when it was in Lightroom.

Hope you found that helpful.

My Field Report on the Canon EOS R6 Mirrorless is here

I just posted it over on my blog today about using it a few days in the field. I shared my focus settings for shooting aviation (or wildlife), and while there is lots to like about the camera, there is a really bad thing, too. Here’s the link if you’ve got a sec.

Here’s wishing you a totally kick-butt week!

-Scott

The post If You Share Your Lightroom Images on Instagram, And the Color Looks Off, Do This… appeared first on Lightroom Killer Tips.

Local Smart Previews

Last week I showed how one could use Super Resolution on a smart preview stored in the cloud, but then I wondered, what about using the smart previews that are stored locally? This does assume that you have created the smart previews first. You can render smart previews as part of import (check the option in the File Handling panel) or you can do it after import by selecting the photos in Grid view of the Library module, and going to Library > Previews > Build Smart Previews.

Exporting Smart Previews

Once you’ve rendered the smart previews you can force LrC to use them by taking your photos offline. For me, I keep the majority of my photo library on an external drive, so I just (safely) disconnected the drive, which makes LrC consider those photos offline (and missing) and puts the smart previews in play. Since I had rendered smart previews of all photos on that drive, I can still edit them in Develop, and even export copies (smart preview size only) if I wish, and that is what I wish for this experiment.

Imagine a scenario where you are working with your photos offline, and for whatever reason you do not have access to the original source photos at that time, but you need something larger than what the smart preview offers, could Super Resolution be a solution in a pinch? Sure, it is not as good as the original, and I don’t mean to suggest it would, but could it be good enough for some uses? The answer is subjective, but feel free to run this test yourself, and file it away in case you ever have the need. Here’s how:

Step One: Select an offline photo which has a smart preview.

Step Two: Click the Export button to open the Export dialog. Chances are, unless you’ve previously disabled this warning, you will see a prompt saying, Originals missing for some images. Smart previews will be used, if available. Do you want to continue? Click Yes, to get to the Export dialog.

Important reminder, smart previews are a special kind of DNG file, so the file type of the source photo is not as important for this exercise, unless you are wanting to change to a different raw profile, apply lens correction, or choose a different white balance preset.

Step Three: On the Export dialog, the key settings are in the File Settings and in the Post-Processing panes. I set File Type to DNG and the Post-Processing step to Open (the copy) in Adobe Photoshop 2021.

By choosing DNG, I know the resulting copy will open directly in ACR. Once in ACR I can right-click the photo and choose Enhance to Super Res it to a larger sized DNG file.

As a bonus step, enable Auto Import, and save the Super Resolution-ified copy to the chosen Watched folder to automatically import the larger version back into LrC.

I also chose to export the starting DNG copy from LrC to a folder on my desktop that I called “To Delete” as this transitional copy is not needed beyond sending to ACR. All I want is the version that is upsized, which I saved from ACR into the “watched” folder I use for Auto Import back into LrC (just remember to go back and delete the transitional copies).

Sure, this will be better when Super Resolution is added to LrC, but for the time being, here’s a workaround you can file away when all you have is a smart preview and you need something a little larger. I’d love to hear about any other workflows you’ve experimented with using super resolution.

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