Lightroom 4: Streamlining Your Digital Photography Process

Chapter 5: EXPORT: Saving New Files From Lightroom

By now you’ve worked all the way through importing your photos and videos, editing them in Library and processing in Develop. So what’s next? Maybe you want to email a few pictures to someone, upload photos or videos to Facebook, or burn a dvd for a client to proof. At times, you might also want to use another program to do more processing on your photos; in addition to generating finished files, Lightroom exports can also help you feed your image files into more extended, automated workflows using post-processing actions and plug-ins. When you’ve gone as far as you can with processing your photos and videos in Lightroom, or you want to share them with other people, it’s time to consider some type of export.

Unlike most other programs, Lightroom doesn’t have a “Save As…” command. So whether you’re distributing finished photos or need to get your files into other imaging software, you will need to export those files with Lightroom. Always keep in mind that the photos and videos aren’t actually contained within the catalog—Lightroom is only referencing the actual files on the hard drive. So when you do an export, you’re using Lightroom to make new copies of the photos and videos, while applying the Lightroom metadata and specified file parameters. When you export, the current adjustments and other metadata are “baked in” to ...