Nik collection in Lightroom (postprocessing)

nicolasnico

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Hi,
I use Lightroom (5.7.1) which has been my main editing tool (and I guess might remain like that). I was planning to use Nik collection, too, and I've installed it in Lightroom. But it offers to edit actually your original photos (raw) as a .tiff. Then, you end up having all these pictures in both format (raw and tif) and in my opinion, it becomes a mess with all these .tiff files vs the original .raw files (which one you edited etc.??) A mess, in my opinion!

My question: to avoid that mess, what would you suggest? Is there a way to use Nik filter without having all your photos in both format (raw and tiff)? if you use Nik filters in Photoshop for instance?
 
If you go into your Lightroom preferences and go to the "External Editing" tab, you can change some settings but maybe nothing that you want.

You can also make smart collections, colored labels, stacking to help organize your LR library (that's what I do). But personally, I don't see the problem in keeping the files, storage is very cheap these days.
 
Saving the edited file the way you want to do it will be destructive editing. That means no going back to the original RAW. Layered TIFFS might make changing back possible, but I would not know how to do it. I only have a hand full of Nik collection edits, but I can see it becoming a 'problem' later. Would be interested to hear how the pro's do it.
 
If you hand over an image from Lightroom to Photoshop, work on it with Nik and then save it, it will end up back in Lightroom the same way as if you had done it directly in Lightroom with Nik. So you will just have the Nik version next to your Raw version again. If you use "save as" in Photoshop you could save it somewhere else and it would not mess up Lightroom, but then it is no more non-destructive and it will not be in your Lightroom Catalog.

You could use color-coding, flagging or ratings to mark the files you have worked on in Nik. You could also stack the same pictures together, so you would only see one preview picture (instead of 2 next to each other). I am not a big fan of the stacking feature though, i always have the feeling that i miss photos that i can't see... :048:
 
Exactly, edit your photos by using light room editing in Photoshop and then bringing them back in the light room, it's a fairly automated process
 
thank you, everyone! Mmh, my problem with external editing isn't the space thing that much, but more the confusion (subfolders, etc.). So, thanks for your advice about color-coding or flagging...
What I might do is make a copy of the RAW file (copy 1) and do a destructive editing of that copy RAW file, what do you think? that would avoid having subfolder, or "sub-files" (TIFF, RAW....). what do you think?
 
thank you, everyone! Mmh, my problem with external editing isn't the space thing that much, but more the confusion (subfolders, etc.). So, thanks for your advice about color-coding or flagging...
What I might do is make a copy of the RAW file (copy 1) and do a destructive editing of that copy RAW file, what do you think? that would avoid having subfolder, or "sub-files" (TIFF, RAW....). what do you think?
Well that is what you are doing now. At least how it works when I edit a photo in Nik collection. The RAW with the LR edits stays in the original place,and the NIK edit is saved as TIFF in the same folder, often 3 times larger than the original RAW. No need to make a copy of the original RAW, unless for backup reasons.
 
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