Open in Camera Raw from Lightroom

[mvsoske]

When edits are made in Lightroom then opened in Photoshop, the file is no longer a raw file. But I was wondering if the file remains a raw file if I choose "open in Camera Raw" from Lightroom?  Attempted a search but no joy.  Your input will be helpful.

Mark

[digitaldog]

Adobe considers raw read only so they never 'touch' the raw itself. The same is true in LR and Photoshop. The rendered image which is new, isn't raw, it's whatever you save it as. But the original raw remains as is. Edits are saved either in a sidecar file, in the LR database and/or within the document IF not a proprietary raw. That's where DNG comes into play. Adobe has no issue saving edits in DNG since they own and control that format, just like TIFF.

[Mark D Segal]

When edits are made in Lightroom then opened in Photoshop, the file is no longer a raw file. But I was wondering if the file remains a raw file if I choose "open in Camera Raw" from Lightroom?  Attempted a search but no joy.  Your input will be helpful.

Mark

When edits are made in Lightroom then opened in Photoshop, it depends on how you send them. If you do Edit In>Photoshop, the file opens in Photoshop (not Camera Raw) and gets tagged with your Photoshop Working Space (say ProPhoto) and converted to a rendered format on the fly for editing in Photoshop, then you do more editing. Let's say you don't save it, but just close Photoshop. Nothing happens to it. It rverts to being a raw file and you lose the edits. (You can see that by reopening it from "Recent Files" in Photoshop. It will open in Camera Raw as a raw file.) If you did save it after editing in Photoshop, it will save as a rendered file (for example, TIFF, PSD), and it will reopen as such in your LR catalog, but the original raw file in Lightroom will still be there beside it as well.

There is no instruction in Lightroom that says "Open in Camera Raw" as you are suggesting. But you can open raw files from Lightroom as Smart Objects in Photoshop, preserving the raw editing capabilities of the original and also use Photoshop to do various other things. The Smart Object is a container that fully preserves the image contents and lets you do editing while keeping the original image data intact. You would use Camera Raw for editing a Smart Object in Photoshop. If you save it, a rendered (e.g. TIFF) version is created. The Smart Object raw version and the rendered version (say TIFF) remain available for more rounds of editing. You can see this by going back to the Recent Files list, opening the TIFF, then double-click the layer thumbnail of that TIFF in the layer menu, and it will re-open as a Smart Object in Camera Raw with your previous edits preserved. This may seem a bit confusing, but when you try it all out a couple of times you'll see how it works - and miraculously it does!

[mvsoske]

Mark- Thanks for your explanation!  That was what I was looking for and yes, I mis-quoted the "open in Camera Raw".

Mark

[digitaldog]

When edits are made in Lightroom then opened in Photoshop, it depends on how you send them. If you do Edit In>Photoshop, the file opens in Photoshop (not Camera Raw) and gets tagged with your Photoshop Working Space (say ProPhoto) and converted to a rendered format on the fly for editing in Photoshop, then you do more editing. Let's say you don't save it, but just close Photoshop.

Nitpicking sorry but that's a tad confusing. If you conduct the Edit In command Photoshop, a document is rendered from the raw data, then ProPhoto RGB is assigned to that data. The data has to be rendered first and foremost.

Let's say you don't save it, but just close Photoshop. Nothing happens to it.

Yes, it isn't saved. Like opening any file, anywhere, if you applied edits but didn't save it, nothing happened to the previous data due to this lack of a save of the edits. In this case with the source being raw data, there's isn't anything to have "nothing happen to it".


Create a new document in Photoshop (or in any app). Apply any edit and close the document (which is just in memory), it's gone.

It rverts to being a raw file and you lose the edits.

There is no 'it' if you don't save 'it'.    Nothing was reverted in terms of that raw. Nothing was saved indeed and nothing reverts. The rendered data is a totally new document and totally different data and when you don't save it, it's gone and the raw was never affected at any time.
The raw is the raw if you save the rendering or you don't. It's read only.

....but the original raw file in Lightroom will still be there beside it as well.

Because it's read only; never affected. Kind of like a piece of film you scan.
I think it's important for the OP to understand there's raw data that is never altered, it's just data used to create new, virgin RGB pixels that land in Photoshop. At this point, it's no different from say duplicating the document within Photoshop, editing that dupe and closing it without saving it. It's gone, nothing reverts; the original was never edited. The copy was, and not saved.

[Mark D Segal]

Mark- Thanks for your explanation!  That was what I was looking for and yes, I mis-quoted the "open in Camera Raw".

Mark

You are welcome.

[mvsoske]

Thanks Andrew!