New Plugin Brings Lightroom and Photoshop Elements Together At Last
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Update: A newer version of this plugin is now available. |
Lightroom’s non-destructive editing capabilities support most of my digital photography workflow needs. I rarely need to resort to external tools to edit my photos, but rarely is not quite the same as never. There will always be some situations where Lightroom needs a little help. For me stitching together panoramas, correcting lens distortion and correcting perspective issues are the main culprits.
Before Lightroom I was a Photoshop Elements (PSE) 6 user. I had been hoping to completely migrate away from it and remove it from my system, but I still keep it around as an external editor to pair with Lightroom. I’d love to be able to splash out and use Photoshop instead but as I’m only a hobbyist I simply can’t afford it. An upsell version (from PSE) of Photoshop CS4 would cost me over $1200 AUD at the Adobe store. That’s a lot of money for a piece of software I would rarely need to use, especially when my couple year old version of PSE does everything I really need at a fraction of the price. My photography would benefit more from me investing that cash in a brand new Nikon DSLR camera body, lens or flash than a software upgrade.
One of the things I’m missing by not using Photoshop is tighter integration between my external editor and Lightroom itself. The Lightroom Photo->Edit In menu contains a number of entries (see above) that allow you to work with files in Photoshop CS3 (or later), launching directly into the desired feature without having to render those files first. This would not only speed up my editing process but also reduce the need to waste CPU cycles rendering files that will only be discarded later anyway. With Photoshop Elements my only option is to use the standard external editor feature which doesn’t allow me to launch directly into the PSE feature I’m planning to use.
My new Elemental plugin resolves these issues. It adds 5 new menu items to the File –> Plug-in Extras and Library –> Plug-In Extras menus, emulating the integration available to users of the full Photoshop product. This includes letting the user select photos and launch them directly into the Photomerge dialog, or open them as Smart Objects (a feature Adobe doesn’t advertise is available in PSE). It even adds some new options for good measure, namely Remove Lens Distortion and the ability to directly Open in PSE. And it does this all while avoiding the Camera Raw dialog which should be redundant given your Develop module edits in Lightroom. The only feature I couldn’t reproduce was Merge to HDR in Photoshop because PSE does not have a matching feature. By all reports the HDR generated by Photoshop was of limited usefulness so I doubt many would miss it anyway.
Usage
When you first try to use one of these menu options the plugin will attempt to locate your installation of Photoshop Elements. If you have used the default install location the plugin shouldn’t require any configuration. If it can’t find PSE then it will open a dialog asking you to locate the PSE editor before you continue.
There are also a few other dialogs you may see during regular operation.
First is a reminder to save your files before opening in PSE. Saving your metadata (Ctrl + S, or Cmd + S) writes the Lightroom edits to the photo or XMP sidecar making them available to other applications. If you don’t save your files first PSE will show the initial, unedited image which is unlikely to be what you intended. Once you’ve gotten into the habit of saving before opening you can configure the warning to not show again.
Next is a warning that displays if one of the selected photos is a virtual copy. Virtual copies do not have a dedicated, matching image file so you can’t save the metadata to the file or sidecar and they can’t be opened in PSE. For virtual copies you will be given the option of opening the master file instead, or ignoring the virtual copies entirely. Once again the dialog can be set to not show again if you have a preferred option you will always use whenever virtual copies are selected.
The last dialog is one you will only see if you use the plugin for more than 3 weeks and it will only show once. Its a “buy me a beer” donation request. I’ve put a fair amount of work into this plugin (including learning a new programming language) to make Photoshop Elements do things its not supposed to be able to do, and to work not only on Windows but also the Mac platform. I’m hoping you will find my plugin useful enough that you would consider saying thanks in a liquid fashion. If you are extra keen you don’t even have to wait for the 3 week reminder. You can donate (and update the configuration) at any time by opening the Elemental entry in File –> Plugin Manager dialog.
I hope you find this plugin useful and as always please leave comments below if you have any feedback you would like to offer. I’d also like to send out a big thank you to Mark over at Rusticolus Images who quite patiently tested the plugin on OSX and helped me iron out a number of rather large kinks on that platform!
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In: Howto, Project, Software · Tagged with: code, lightroom, lr2, photoshopelements, plugin, pse, workflow
Thanks for a great plugin!
I am having some difficulties with, I presume, the bit depth.
When I try to Remove Lens distortion, the command is unavailable (I get two error messages: “The command Correct Camera Distortion is unavailable” and Error 8007: User Cancelled the operation line 51: executeAction(id93, desc26)
I’ve tried to default everything (Preferences, dialog box when using the plugin, etc.) to use PSE6 with 8bit PSD, but that doesn’t solve the issue.
In fact the settings to convert automatically to 8bits seems to be ignored altogether
Regards,
Eiffel
@Eiffel, I wouldn’t have expected bit depth to be a factor in this issue. Can you please let me know what OS you are using and the file type you were trying to process. I’ll also send you an email and would appreciate it if you could reply with your Elemental.log file.
No file conversion occurs within the plugin so that explains why the automatic conversion is ignored. The User cancelled error is something you can ignore (I will update my plugin to hide this in future). The “Correct Camera Distortion” error is more the issue. The log file might help out here with diagnosing the issue.
Thanks for the quick reply
I’ve just sent you a log file showing what happens when I try to open a jpeg file (all works well), a tif (16bits) and a raw (Sony ARW) file (errors messages)
@Eiffel, Have received your email. Might take me a little while to work through this but I have started on it.
@Eiffel, Thanks for working with me to debug these issues. Version 20090721.004 resolves these issues that were (as you correctly surmised) related to bit depth.
Hi and thanks so much for this plugin. So far, it doesn’t work for me but I’d love to help iron out the kinks and will definitely be inclined to buy you a beer (or 10) for the trouble..the mere effort alone is worth that!
I’ve selected three images to merge to panorama. I receive the following error:
Error 8000: Cannot open the file because the open options are incorerct – Line: 104
-> currentDocument=open(File(fileList[i]), optionsCameraRawOpen);
I have no idea what this means..lol.
Also, I’d be a total asshole not to mention that I’m using: Lightroom 2 Version 2.4 – 572242 – Camera Raw 5.4 – 64-bit
Perhaps that right there is the problem – 64-bit? I wouldn’t be surprised 😉
Thanks again 🙂
Ian
EDIT: I’m also running Vista Business 64bit
@Ian, Sorry it isn’t working for you yet. I’ve sent you an email, and if you could please reply to that with your log file it would be helpful. Also what version of PSE are you using? And what file type were you trying to merge to panorama?
Matt. I converted the .cr2 images in lightroom to .jpg and it works just fine this way 🙂
@Ian, Glad to hear that converting to a JPEG works around the issue, but I’ll still look into this because that step should not be necessary.
Thanks! Also, for what it’s worth. I’m new to digital photography and just picked up my first DSLR. It’s a T1i. Upon purchase, Lightroom 2 wouldn’t recognize the raw files at all, I had to wait for an update which defined the camera. Don’t know if this helps at all, but I suspect the problem may be related, especially if your plugin normally works with Canon raw files.
Thanks again Matt!
Enjoy the beer 😉
@Ian, Wanted to close out this comment thread. Turned out the issue was an older version of Camera Raw couldn’t cope with your new camera’s raw files. An upgrade of Camera Raw fixed the problem. I’m going to improve error handling and the Plugin Manager dialog to assist with upgrading Camera Raw when required.
And the beer tasted great. Thanks!
Yep, definitely closed and working like a champ (in Lightroom 2 64bit w/ 32bit Elements 7 btw) 🙂 In my case, I simply missed the fact that Camera Raw installed for Lightroom automatically but didn’t install in Elements 7, which required that I download a separate package from Adobe and manually install it. Of course, as I mentioned to you, I didn’t do much troubleshooting as I’m so used to things not working quite right w/ 64bit apps that I didn’t think much of it. Thanks again for working with me to get this sorted out! I sure wish paid products came with this kind of support 😉 Thanks again Matt!! If you ever need any help testing anything in the future w/ 64bit, feel free to hit me up, I’m not normally this dense 😉
Thanks for new plug-in. I’m having a problem opening from lightroom2.0 to pse6 on a Mac. It tells me to save metadata for the file first. So I do and the save warning comes up again. I then open in pse6 and the changes I did in lightroom were not transfered to pse6. I have updated my lightroom and pse6 with the newest camera raw. What am I doing wrong.
@Rebecca, The save dialog will come up every time you use an Elemental menu item unless you check the “do not show again” option at the bottom left of the dialog. That said it shouldn’t appear twice during the execution of a single menu item selection. If you see this behaviour with the new version then please let me know the circumstances under which you experienced the error.
The changes made in Lightroom should always transfer to PSE if you save the metadata first. If this is not working for you please let me know the Camera Raw version you are using and how you save the metadata (Cmd + S?). Please also make sure you don’t already have the file open in PSE before saving the file because that could prevent the Lightroom changes from being saved to the file.
I am thinking about purchasing lightroom 2, I have been using elements 6 and am needing something different to help with my workflow. I have recently purchased 2 computers with windows 7, will I run into problems?
@Melissa, I have the Lightroom 3 beta running on my Win 7 machine and haven’t tried Lightroom 2 on it yet. I’ve read that Lightroom 2 runs on Win 7, but you could always download the trial version to make sure you are happy it works OK. If you like living on the edge you could download the Lightroom 3 beta instead. No news yet on when the next (final?) release of that will be made available.
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I’ve installed the plugin and the “view/plug-in extras” pick shows all the elemental options, but when I pick one (any one) nothing happens. Do you have any idea why that would be?
I’m running Windows 7, Lightroom 3 and PSE 9.
I’ve followed the directions for installation, and restarted Lightroom.
Thanks for your help.
@Paul, Have you selected a photo before clicking on the File -> Plug-in Extras -> … menu item? If you don’t have a photo selected the menu items will be visible, but grey and won’t respond if you click on them. If you have selected an incompatible photo you should get a dialog letting you know why it is incompatible, and any other error should result in some form of notification of the problem. If selecting a photo first doesn’t resolve the issue let me know and we’ll try to work through it offline.
Thanks for your reply.
Yes, I have selected a photo. I’ve tried selecting a photo and then picking “open in pse”, and selecting multiple photos and then picking “merge to panorama in pse”. In both cases the dialogue about saving metadata comes up, I click “ok, and then nothing happens.
Incidentally, on a slightly different note, I had disabled that particular warning with the check box. A minute ago I “re-enabled” the warning through the plug-in manager, but the warning is still not showing up.
I guess there’s no solution?
@Paul, Apologies for the delay in getting back to you. New addition to the family means PC time is a little erratic right now and I missed the updates. I’ll email you to track down what is happening here.
No problem. Congratulations. Please take your time on this. There’s no rush.
I’m not sure I want to tell you this but I might as well do my mea culpa online. I started to find the log as you requested in your offline email, and send additional info. What I discovered from the plug-in manager was that I had entered the name of the lightroom executable, rather the the PSE editor executable. Oops. Not too surprising that not much was happening.
I corrected, and everything is working fine.
Thanks for the help and enjoy the addition 🙂
@Paul, thanks for letting us know. I’ll still check in with you offline to see if there is anything further I can do to prevent this type of issue from cropping up again in future. And thanks for the kind thoughts. 🙂