Lightroom Desktop: Additional options needed when exporting

My prediction: lossless sharing between Lighroom mobile and Photoshop mobile (yay), but severely limited export options in Photoshop. This way you’re locked into using Photoshop mobile instead of Affinity Photo or other competitor products. I’ll eat my hat if something else happens.

I’ll believe the “Adobe has no interest in preventing you from using other products” line when I see it.

That would be outrageous and hard to believe (not impossible). There is more to workflow than Photoshop. Just give your customer industry standard export options: original, lossy and lossless. 

Locking every down also ensures that their entire Classic user base will never switch over, which should be their goal since they are leaking customers to Serif, Skylum, On1, Capture One and many others right now judging on comments and forums. 

Let's see... here is hoping that we'll get this for Christmas in the December update.

Okay worked this out. This is all on the iPad Pro.

If from the iPad I export to camera roll at full res, it looks good.
Export to files and ask for full res, then not good.
Export at lower res to files, and even lower res looks good.

So I’m guessing when you export to camera roll, it’s exported for a iPad screen?
And export to files for print or other??

If this is the case, Adobe should of made this clear.

Interesting findings.

Just make sure of the following. Like what you find on a mac, when you preview a image, it looks terrible in the finder window, but when viewed on a application like photos, it looks way better.

What you may find is that files app is designed to preview the image at a certain quality. So when a low res image is previewed it looks way better, but a high res image looks bad, because of the way the files app renders the preview downgraded. The photos app may be suited to preview a high res file way better.

Non of the above really have anything to do with the actual quality of the original image, that either gets printed or ultimately used in a particular way, like a website.

The reason id suggest it doesn't make a difference is because Lightroom mobile first renders the file before you decide which folder to save to. Ive printed from both high res rendered to photos and files app, both are identical.

I am sure if you simply moved the images from the files app to photos, you should get the same results.

This is my guess.

Okay, I’m going to give that a go now.
That’s a point I didn’t think about that.

You are totally correct.
Copied the image in Lightroom folder in photos on the Mac into iCloud folder, and viewed on the iPad.
The image looks worse from iCloud, but it’s the same image file.

And to think I was about to chuck my toys out my pram

Awesome, good thing you did the experiment, we can learn from it.

I first learnt this issue when I did a job for a client, and after handover he called me to say, i should really apply more noise reduction in post to my higher ISO images, only to find out, that on a mac, when he previewed in the finder window, the preview shows a terrible, noisy copy of the image, but when you open the image in photoshop or even a basic photo app, the images looked perfect, like you had seen when editing.

You can just imagine how many people after seeing their preview went back into Lightroom and destroyed their images by increasing adjustments, not knowing it was actually just a terrible preview. 

Printing or viewing full res in a photo programme is always the true test for me.

This just gets better. If you make a folder in iCloud, then put the image in there and view all good. Just not direct in iCloud root folder.

All very odd, but I can work with all now I know that oddities.

Just to confirm to everyone.
The images were being viewed on the iPad, and was the same issue on my pro and air.
Just don’t view direct from iCloud, out into its own folder. Or save to Lightroom folder. Still need a better way to rename etc, but the issue was poor images equally.

When you say rename, what are you referring to? Renaming the file on export?

Yeah that’s it.

You can use the app called Workflow. I think apple bought it and changed the name, it may be called shortcuts now. In this app you can create a file renaming and resizing based on pixels action as an extension or widget action.  See attached these shortcuts I've created, you are welcome to use them.

This may sound complicated, but just go check it out, its easy. You either have a choose to save the files first to a folder then rename with a widget, or rename with an extension. Batch resize, batch rename and both rename and resize at the same time as both widget and extension.

Batch Resize File Ext
Batch Resize File
Batch Rename / Resize Ext
Batch Rename File Ext
Batch Rename File

If you are looking to export 1 original at a time, select an image, then top right, hit the share icon and export original.

If you want to get all your original raws held by lightroom off your iPad, plug it into your desktop or laptop, open iTunes, select file sharing, select Lightroom and you’ll see one folder with a long name. Select folder, scroll down to save button, hit it, choose folder and save.

In that folder is every raw file held by lightroom.

If you referring to the fact cloud Is now holding the originam image and not your mobile device, then I’m not sure. That’s why I always make sure I choose store locally on albums, so I’ve got a hard copy on my iPad.

Jean, why not use LR Classic? Classic has the printing module, so you could ditch going via Aperture.

> I want to get an original out of Lightroom CC

In LR CC desktop, select the photo (or multiple photos in Grid view), go to File menu > Save To > Original & Settings format. That'll download the original from the cloud if it's not already stored locally, and save it to your hard drive in its original format.

My dad still uses Lightroom 6, and works fine. Why has Lr5 stopped?
Lightroom CC is a very different thing, than Lr Classic CC.

I like Cloud auto backup and have it working across my devices, I'm now just using Lr CC on desktop and iPad.