Lightroom and exporting for online printing

[ronaldirani]

HI all,
I recently worked alongside the photographer at my cousins wedding for practice, a great learning experience. Anyway, I have some questions about using lightroom and exporting my photos to print from online photolabs such as Mpix and WHCC. Here is my current workflow.
After the shoot I will use the lightroom import screens to convert my RAW files to DNG and save them to my external hard drive. I also burn a backup DVD.
After sorting the pictures and assigning flags and rankings, i will create a collection of shots that I want to print. Since I do not have my own printer, nor do I want one at the moment, I must process the images to be sent to the lab.
I will do most of my edits in Lightroom, color, etc. Everything but crop. I will then click the "edit in CS2" box, choosing the option to "edit a copy using lightroom adjustments".
This brings the image into photoshop where i will do the remaining edits, sharpening, and various other things. I will then choose save from the file menu. This saves a copy back in lightroom as filename-edit.psd. After saving, I will then crop the image to the size i am going to print, then save as in a separate folder as a jpeg to upload to the lab.

Now, the problem i have with my workflow, which i do not know how to correct is this. When i save the file in photoshop it creates a completly new file alongside the original. I like not editing the original image, but this seems like a huge waste of space. I thought that lightroom saved its edits in the EXIF data or something so as not to use as much storage space. I have the original RAW file that is nearly 8MB on my harddrive, and then after editing and saving in photoshop, i have a new PSD file that is 20-30MB!!! Am i doing something worng, have a setting wrong or what. I just feel that i am making useless coppies of files, and bloating my library. If someone has a workflow to export images to specific sizes for outside printing, please, help me out, i feel like im doing this the hard way.


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