newbie question-how to have edits show in the DNG files for hand off.

[sonarthug]

I am only starting to use Lightroom. I have been using Photoshop since version 3. And I have been using Bridge since day 1. I shoot events for a community college and normally do all editing in Camera Raw and pass the DNG's on for archiving. Our DAM creates derivatives on the fly from those files. But now we are transitioning to Lightroom. My question is simple. How do I apply my Lightroom edits to the DNG's that I still have to pass on. I can't figure that out.
Thanks,
Joe

[john beardsworth]

Ctrl S in Windows, Cmd S on Mac.

Or export the files as DNGs, creating new copies.

[Schewe]

Explain "hand off"...do you mean that you need new copies of the DNG files to move to a new location/person? If so, Export a DNG as John mentions...but if the hand off is local and the original DNG files will be used for the DAM then saving the settings into the DNG file will do (as John says). The difference is whether or not you must spawn off new files or just use the existing files.

[wolfnowl]

Joe: By default LR keeps all of the history information, etc. solely in the database (catalogue). You can write this metadata out to the files one of two ways.  One is to do it manually (select images and press Ctrl/Cmd-S as suggested), or by going to Metadata/Write metadata to files.  The other way is to go into the LR preferences and check the box that says, "Autowrite changes to .xmp".  It's off by default.  Turning this one WILL cause a tradeoff in performance because every change to an image or images is then written to the files.  Only you can decide if it's worth it.  I leave it on for the same reason I have 'autobackup' set to 5 minutes in MS Word and other programs - because I'm lousy at remembering to save files.  There's no 'save' feature in LR, but if your catalogue becomes corrupted and you've written the metadata out you can recover much faster because creating a new catalogue and importing images will bring MOST of the information with them.  Collections, etc. are only in the catalogue.

Mike.