I tend to use a Lightroom to Photoshop workflow quite often now in my re-touch. When i do this i like to work non-desructively and keep my original RAW file as long as possible, even when coming from Lightroom.
I’ve written about this technique many times (a few of the related posts can be found below).
#CreativeFriday – Photoshop and Lightroom Workflows, Smart Objects and Compositing Images
#CreativeFriday – Lightroom and Photoshop Workflows, Smart Objects and Camera RAW filter
#CreativeFriday – Photoshop’s Fade feature enhancement in Photoshop CC 2015
This technique is amazing and will keep your RAW file as a RAW file with the Lightroom or Camera RAW (ACR) adjustments.
This workflow will embed the RAW file plus the Lightroom/ACR adjustments into the Photoshop Smart Object layer. But sometimes it might be required to extract the RAW file from the Smart Object layer.
To do this, double click on the Photoshop Smart Object layer (marked in red below) and enter the Camera RAW panel.
To extract the original file, the ‘Save Image’ can be used from the Camera RAW panel (marked in red below)
The Save Image dialog box will be shown
This will extract the image to a location that you can specify.
N.B. A couple of things to note :-
- Saving anything other than a DNG file will bake in the Camera Raw or Lightroom adjustments into the save file (PSD/TIFF or JPG)
- Saving as a DNG will not bake in the adjustments, the original RAW file can be recovered in Lightroom or Camera RAW.