Automate your LR workflow with a droplet

[Eric Neilsen]

YOu can set up an action in PS and save it as a droplet to help automate your workflow out of Lightroom. So there is no need not to batch process your work and STILL use Noiseware, etc to improve your images.

Eric

[AllizDogStudios]

Can you go into details on how this is done? I've never heard of a droplet.

[Eric Neilsen]

Droplets can be made in CS1, 2 or 3. You first need to make an action or use an existing one. I haven't tested the action sets on the site, but George was running a few at PS World in Orlando and I've tested a few of my own.

It is important to pay attention to the check boxes in the action as well. You can allow an action to run straight through, or you can make it stop and allow you to adjust the sliders, etc to make each picture. It would depend on how much control of each image you need or desire at that time.

When you create the droplet, you go to the File>Automate>Create Droplet.


make sure you put the droplet into the LR folder. Here I have the E: drive as the main program location and the OS is XP Home.

From within LR you set up an Export preset that calls for that Export Action to be run. Now you can run Noiseware or the other plug ins without opening PS and slowing down your workflow. Try it with a few images first to make sure it works for you. THen go ahead and batch away.

Eric

[George]

We are currently working on making all of the Noiseware and Portraiture actions into droplets that will work within Lightroom. However, there are several caveats that you need to be aware of before you start experimenting with droplet/Lightroom output.

The current version of LR(Lightroom) doesn't allow you to automatically import the droplet processed images back into LR. In the Export dialog within LR, your only choice for Export Location is a folder, which you can choose manually, with the option of Put in Subfolder. This can be confusing to the average user of LR as most are used to stacking images or seeing the result of a Photoshop export immediately within LR. Your only option at this point is to import the images processed with a droplet back into your LR database. The new Version 2 Beta of LR has a feature to allow images processed with droplets to be automatically added to the current database.

You have to be extremely careful when using the export feature with droplets due to the fact that it will default to last used settings and so you may end up overwriting already processed files.

Droplets created with Photoshop have to be placed within the Export Actions folder so LR can find them. For the PC:
C:\Documents and Settings\User Name\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom\Export Actions
For the Mac:
/users/user name/library/application support/adobe/lightroom
where user name is the logged on user.
Once the droplets have been saved to the correct folder, the LR export dialog will show these in Post-processing After Export as a dropdown list.

Also, droplets created with Photoshop through File-Automate-Create Droplet are basically small executable files and so if you change any parameter of a Photoshop action such as turning on and off dialogs, adding steps, etc., the droplet you previously created for the changed action will have to be updated with these changes. Simply run the Create Droplet sequence again and select the changed action to update the executable droplet. If you don't update the droplet with the changes to the action, LR will continue to use the old settings and this will surely cause confusion.

In essence, the ability to use droplets in LR gives one the power of using all of their Photoshop actions within LR without having to manually access Photoshop. Any plugin sequence can be automated using actions and the subsequent droplet used in LR will run these automatically. So far, our testing has shown that our plugins work well with this LR/droplet paradigm and we hope to have usable droplets and usage info up shortly on the Imagenomic site.

Also, it should be noted that Photoshop does have to be open for droplets to work. If Photoshop isn't open when you try to run the droplet, then it will be opened automatically for you.

Hope this helps,
George