Lightroom tip: Photoshop 8/16 bits external editor

Photographers who own both Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, will automatically see Photoshop as the first external editor in Lightroom. Most photographers simply won’t assign a second external editor, because what second editor do you need if you have Photoshop? Here’s a tip to use the second editor in a different way: The default setting for ‘Edit in Photoshop’ is ProPhotoRGB and 16 bits/color. That will retain the full color information of the raw file, but it does mean the files you edit in Photoshop will be quite big. A 25 Mpixel file will become a whopping 100 MB file when sent to Photoshop. That may still be fine if you edit one image, but if you need to send multiple images to Photoshop (for stitching a panorama, for stacking into layers, for generating an HDR image) your computer may become very slow. In that case it might be better to send 8 bits AdobeRGB files. You could go to the preferences and change the settings, but here’s a better way. Add Photoshop as the second editor, then change the settings of one of the two editors to 8 bits AdobeRGB. I chose to do that for the original (top) version, so that direct menus like ‘Merge to Panorama in Photoshop’ will generate 8 bits images. If I want to edit a file in 16 bits ProPhotoRGB, I simply choose the second menu ‘Edit in Photoshop’.