Editing a JPEG photo in Photoshop

- In the next few movies we'll be taking a look at how we can use Lightroom and Photoshop together in order to achieve the best results. We'll start off with this photograph here that I captured of my buddy John, and with this image, what I want to do is remove the ladder. Now this would be impossible to accomplish in Lightroom so in order to achieve that task we need to jump over to Photoshop, and with your image either in the Develop or the Library modules, in order to open it up in Photoshop, simply go to the Photo pull-down menu, then select Edit In, then choose Edit in Adobe Photoshop, and select the version of Photoshop that you have.

When you click on this it will open up a dialogue because this is a JPEG image, and this dialogue is asking us, "hey, how do you want to handle this file "as we send it over to Photoshop?" We have three options. The first option, Edit Original, edits the file without anything that we've done in Lightroom. Probably isn't the best idea, right? Because usually we work on our files in Lightroom and we want that to go with us as we go to Photoshop. So, not the best option. Next, Edit a Copy, is duplicating the file and then don't include any of our Lightroom adjustments.

Again, not a great option. The best one is Edit a Copy with everything we've done in Lightroom, whatever that is, noise reduction, added contrast, increase the exposure, et cetera. Alright, so here we'll choose Edit a Copy with Lightroom Adjustments and we'll click Edit, and this will then prepare and send that file over to Photoshop. Now that we're here in Photoshop, what I'm gonna do is begin to do some retouching. Here we'll grab our Lasso Tool and then I'm just going to click and drag around the ladder and because we're on the background layer we can press the delete key on a Mac, backspace on Windows, to open up our Fill dialogue.

We're looking for a Content-Aware Fill and Color Adaptation turned on, and if you aren't familiar with this feature it isn't really the point except to say that there are certain things we just can't do in Lightroom that we can do extremely well here. Alright? Let me go ahead and make one more selection of the reflection down below, press delete or backspace, and then click OK, and voila, without a ton of effort we have some pretty good retouching. Now we could fine-tune that a little bit more but I think for all intents and purposes you get the point.

Alright, well once you've finished your work in Photoshop, how do you get back to Lightroom, and how do you save what you've done to Lightroom? What actually happens by default, all that you need to do is save and close the file. So here we'll go to our File pull-down menu, we're going to select Save, then we'll go to the File pull-down menu again, and choose Close. So, again, once you've finished your work in Photoshop, just save and close the file, then jump back to Lightroom. And here's where you'll discover something which is great.

That file will be saved in the same exact location. We'll notice it has a new name, it has a little -Edit on it, it's a TIF file format. Here we have the original file with the ladder and then the file without the ladder. And really, we only would have been able to achieve that by jumping over to Photoshop and then coming back. And the great thing about this is that once we've come back we can continue to work on this file inside of Lightroom, so now in a sense we have the best of both worlds, or as I said in one of the previous movies, whenever we can use Lightroom and Photoshop together, we can accomplish the best results.