Adobe Lightroom Help Needed

[AprilRamone]

Hey Everyone,
So, I just got Lightroom on Saturday and I'm attempting to use the program to start editing my photoshoots in hopes that eventually as I learn it better, it will be faster than working on images individually in Photoshop.
Anyway, here's a quick rundown of what I've done and the problem I now have.
1.) I imported my images from the memory card into lightroom and fiddled around with exposure. Put the flagged images into a "collection."
2.) Exported the images to a folder on my hard drive. Used the Large Jpeg format.
3.) Opened them up and did some more with adding in different light and did a soft look for some of them. Saved them.
4.) Imported those images back into Lightroom and added a vignette to all of them. Also made a B&W version with Vignettes and exported both versions to another folder on the hard drive.

Now, here is my problem. I wanted to put them back into PS so I could put them in 4x6" size. I know that Lightroom has that section where you can crop them to a certain size, but I don't believe it sizes them smaller? (I could be wrong). But regardless, in PS, when I dragged the image into a new file and saved it, it seemed to lose some of the color vibrancy that I had worked hard to get!

Any ideas on what's going on?
I appreciate any help I hate learning new programs!
Thanks,
April

 

[Garbz]

Ok a few problems here. Firstly rather than importing or exporting you should probably investigate the edit with external program option which stacks the changed images on top of each other. Makes keeping track of them very easy, but this has not answered your question...

The lightroom crop feature just crops to a ratio and doesn't resize. That's all you should ever do. The final print size is determined when you print, resizing will cause a loss in quality which can not be recovered. Clicking crop in lightroom and selecting a 4x6 at the bottom will keep that ratio. When you're in the print tab later you can select 4x6 8x12 6x9 etc. You can do this in any other printing program as well.

The colour problems you are having are due to colour spaces. Lightroom defaults to PhotoPro a space which Photoshop can also read, but not much else can at this point. This is another reason to use the external editor option rather then exporting and importing. In the lightroom preferences you can set edit in photoshop to keep the photopro colour space but edit in external editor to convert to the standard sRGB. Alternatively when you click export set the image to sRGB under image settings.

 

[AprilRamone]

Thanks for your help Garbz, I'm sure I'll be changing up my editing process as I learn the program better.
Do you know if I can use the print option in lightroom if I just want to send my prints to a printer to get printed? I don't do any of my own printing at home.
-A

 

[Garbz]

No, in this case it is often best to familiarise yourself with who you will be printing with. My local pro lab requests the resulting image in a fine JPEG with sRGB colour space and 300ppi resolution. In this case I modify the settings when I export from lightroom, or in photoshop itself. I am not sure how to upsample in lightroom I have only ever used photoshop for this.

On the other hand rabbit photo who do most of my printing request just the files and the size I want them in. I just get the crop right before sending them off.