Today’s Question: I sometimes have images I am preparing for a project, but that I don’t need to keep in Lightroom Classic. This usually involves sending an image to Photoshop to work on. Afterward the resulting image is in Lightroom Classic of course, but is there a way to avoid that? I just want the final image saved in a project folder, and not have it in the Lightroom Classic catalog.
Tim’s Quick Answer: In this scenario my recommendation would be to follow the normal workflow for sending the image from Lightroom Classic to Photoshop, move the image to a project folder within Lightroom Classic if you’d like, and then remove the photo from the catalog without deleting it.
More Detail: In most cases when you want to send a photo from Lightroom Classic to Photoshop you will want to continue managing the new derivative image within your Lightroom Classic catalog. Even if you ultimately don’t want the derivative image in your catalog, I recommend using the same initial workflow.
So, in Lightroom Classic you can select the image you want to edit in Photoshop, then from the menu choose Photo > Edit In > Edit in Adobe Photoshop. This will send the image to Photoshop, where you can use any of the tools and features to finalize the derivative image. When you’re done simply save the image and close it.
At this point the image will be alongside the original within the Lightroom Classic catalog. If you want to move it to a project folder, you can do that directly within your catalog. Simply drag-and-drop the image to the desired destination folder within the Folders list on the left panel in the Library module. If you’d like, you can also create a new folder in any location by clicking the plus button to the right of the Folders heading and choosing “Add Folder”.
After you drag-and-drop the derivative image to a new folder location, you can remove it from Lightroom Classic if you’d like. Just be sure that you haven’t applied any adjustments in Lightroom Classic after creating the derivative image in Photoshop, as those won’t be retained in the source file on the hard drive.
To remove the derivative image from Lightrooom Classic you can simply right-click on it and choose Remove Photo from the popup menu. In this case you would click the “Remove from Lightroom” button (rather than the “Delete from Disk” button) because you are simply removing the image from your Lightroom Classic catalog without deleting the source image file.
Moving forward, of course, you could open the derivative image on your hard drive directly into Photoshop to perform any additional adjustments you may need.
