Lightroom: Export Settings for PSD

Lightroom allows you to export your photos in:

• JPEG: Joint Photographic Experts Group
• PSD: Photoshop document
• TIFF: Either “Tagged Image File Format” or “Tag Image File Format” depending on when. Now it’s only TIFF.
• DNG: Digital negative
• Original

Exporting photos as PSD file is mostly done for sending photos to somebody else so they can further process it in Adobe Photoshop. If you want to do your own processing in Photoshop, you should be using the Photo > Edit in Photoshop. The exported PSD photos are the photos after all the edits done in Lightroom.

First you select your photo or photos, then in Library module, you select the Export button and you will get:

1. Select the PSD format. The Color Space can be either sRGB, AdobeRGB, or ProPhoto RGB. If you want to save space then use the sRGB, the lowest “color gamut”, while ProPhoto RGB has the highest “color gamut”. The Bit Depth can either be 8bit or 16bit. And now we can start the various religious wars. Should you use 8bit per channel or 16bit per channel? All screens only use 8bit output, whether you set it to 8bit or 16bit. Almost all printers use 8bit output, whether you set it to 8bit or 16bit. There are very few printers that have 16bit drivers, such as the Epson x900 series printers or some Canon IPx100 series printers. The 16bit PSD file will be significantly larger that the 8bit PSD file.
2. Where to export the photo? The original folder or any other specific folder and if the file exist, what will Lightroom do? Ask you, overwrite, or rename the new file.
3. Any naming scheme? The original file or whatever you want… I usually use the same naming system that I use to import the photos in Lightroom. See: Lightroom: How to Set File Names for my personal preferences to name files and photos.
4. Image sizing: Allows you to set the final dimension of the PSD file. What I don’t understand is why? You already control the crop with Lightroom, and you are exporting the photos to Photoshop, where they can do anything, crop, enlarge…
5. Output sharpening: Introduces artifacts to degrade the quality of the exported photo, which they will be removing with Photoshop, so you are only creating extra work.
6. Metadata: Do you want to remove your metadata, and only keep your copyrights and keywords? My only question is why add your Copyright Watermark? They can remove it in Photoshop.