Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 3: Streamlining Your Digital Photography Process

Chapter 5. EXPORT

Exporting photos from Lightroom

By now you've worked all the way through importing, editing and developing your photos in Lightroom. What's next? Maybe you want to email someone a photo, upload images to a photo-sharing Web site, or burn a set of low resolution files to DVD for a client to proof. Other times, you'll want to process a photo further using different imaging software.

Unlike other programs, Lightroom doesn't have a "Save As..." command. So whether you're distributing finished photos or need to get working image files out of Lightroom and into other software, you will very often export those files from Lightroom.

Lightroom exports can also help you feed your image files into more extended, automated workflows: using plug-ins and post-processing actions, Lightroom can trigger all kinds of automated processes on the exported photos. These procedures are discussed further in Chapter 9.

Exporting photos from Lightroom always generates new image files. But depending on the purpose of the export, the new files are not always saved to your hard disk following the completion of the export. For example, if you're burning a dvd to copy or back up some files, maybe you don't need to save another set of local copies on your machine after the disc is burned.

In cases where you do save the newly exported files to your hard disk, you have the option to also add those images into the current Lightroom catalog.

Generally speaking, the Lightroom export process is straightforward: ...