Ok, I know, I really should be calling this part of the blog ‘Lightroom Tip of the Month’ or maybe even ‘My bi-quarterly Lightroom Tip’ but I hope to improve the frequency of the tips now that I’m back in Belgium.
Anyway, in the previous tip I showed you how I use the Edit In / Open as Layers in Photoshop feature in Lightroom to ‘fade’ the effect of a Lightroom Preset, for lack of a quicker way of doing so in Lightroom. Today, I want to show you another use of the Edit In / Open as Layers option.
It’s not strictly a Lightroom tip, it’s more of a Lightroom meets Photoshop Workflow Tip… I tend to use Lightroom as much as possible, but for some things, you just have to use Photoshop. Still when I go to Photoshop, I tend to do so from within Lightroom, because I know my edited Photoshop file will be put nicely into my Lightroom Catalog (that is, if I choose ‘Save’ in Photoshop, before returning back to Lightroom. Never choose ‘Save As…’ on a file that you sent from Lightroom to Photoshop, because Lightroom will lose track of it. That’s kind of a tip-within-the-tip for making up for my less-than-frequent posting behaviour 
Anyway, here’s the video. If you have other uses of the Edit in / Open as Layers in Photoshop, please share them in the Comments!
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for sharing this technique! Although I knew it existed, I only used it a few times so far for testing purposes.
I presume that you do all the modifications in Lightroom before you merge those pictures in Photoshop?
@ Serge: yes, that would be the most logical thing to do. Although you can of course continue to edit the result in Lightroom, as I did when I cropped it. But especially stuff like White Balance correction should be done in Lightroom first.
So the full workflow would be:
1) adjust the first image in Lightroom
2) synchronize the settings to apply them to the second image
3) open both images as Layers as in the video
If you don’t intend on doing heavy corrections afterwards, you might want to convert the file to 8 bit in Photoshop before saving it (right after the Flatten Image step in the video). That would reduce your file size by another 50%.