Good Friday to you! 🙂

Today we will talk about saving adjustments in Lightroom so you could reuse them in other applications.

When you work with your images in Lightroom, whether you work in Lightroom 2 or Lightroom 3, there are two ways to keep information about all the adjustments:

• Lightroom Catalog –  within .lrcat file
• Sidecar files – .xmp files

If you use sidecar files, the .xmp files will appear next to your images (as shown below, Sidecar files are very small .xmp files storing Metadata ie. IPTC and adjustments settings.):

If you take a Raw image and import it into another application, the information from the .xmp file will be read by this application.

Let’s say you want to share some images with another application, f.ex. Adobe Bridge, you will need .xmp files, otherwise you won’t see all the adjustments done in Lightroom as they will be saved in the .lrcat file.

If you use jpg images instead of Raw, all the metadata will be saved into the actual file, instead of creating .xmp files.

To set up how Lightroom saves metadata (xmp or lrcat), go to Catalog Settings:

• Win – Edit -> Catalog Settings,
• Mac – Lightroom -> Catalog Settings

and navigate to Metadata Panel. In here you will find the option called: Automatically Write Changes into XMP – this defines how you work with metadata in Lightroom.

Have Fun! 🙂

Have a lovely weekend! On Monday we will talk about Mini Bridge in Photoshop CS5.