Lightroom & External Editing

[tdettmann]

I recently purchased Adobe's Lightroom after trialing both it and Apple's Aperture. I chose Lightroom because it's mix of features best matched my own working style, though both packages had something unique that they brought to the table. Since I purchased it, I've been reading books and talking to people about Lightroom, trying to learn to use it as well as I possibly can.

In the process of talking to other people using Lightroom, I've run across an assumption that Lightroom can only be used with Photoshop as an external editor. Certainly, in what I've read, when the external editor is mentioned, the author goes into Photoshop. However, Adobe was smarter than this because not only can you change the primary editor Lightroom will use, but you can also configure a 2nd editor for use with Lightroom. That leaves us open for lots of possibilities. One of the more interesting ones for people who can't afford Photoshop is GIMP.

If you go to the Lightroom Preferences, you'll find a configuration for External Editing. I selected GIMP as a 2nd editor under 'Additional External Editor' and configured Lightroom to pass the file to it as an 8-bit, AdobeRGB(1998) file at a resolution of 240 using ZIP compression:





As a trial, I selected a picture I recently took and went to the 'Photo->Edit In' menu from which I was now able to select either Photoshop or GIMP. Selecting GIMP automatically started the required X-Windows environment under OSX and then GIMP itself:





On doing a very simple edit, in this case just cropping the image to make it easy to see when I got back to Lightroom, I saved the image (which now has -edit added to the end of the name) and came back to Lightroom where it shows up next to the original image which is still selected.





Checking the metadata, it was carried over appropriately from the original image showing the correct date and time of the original image and that it was taken with the camera in my TREO mobile phone.

OK ... so I can use another editor or even two editors, why would I want to?? There are several reasons to add this to your toolkit:

• I find that there are some things I can do easier or better in one editor than in another. For example, I can write special processing for an image in Python or LISP in GIMP and execute that on my image. I also have extensions in GIMP to do some things for which I don't have Photoshop extensions.
  
• You may not be able to purchase Photoshop or you may prefer another editor for creative editing. There are lots of good programs out there with limited, special functionality. This could be a good way to tap them from Lightroom.
  
• If you have a special processing program you use often, you could run this from Lightroom as the 2nd external editor. This probably makes sense only if you use it as a normal part of your workflow.
  

No matter what your reason, using another editor with Lightroom gives you additional options that you may want to consider as part of your creative workflow.

Stop by my blog at blog.in2scifi.org for more of my own work.

[Nicole]

I use the Nik Software plugins which in LR are each additional external editors. So that's what and why I use them