More easily use a different raw processor in Lightroom

Being an Alpha mount user, It would be nice to use a different raw processor instead of the ACR engine in Lightroom, particularly when dealing with high ISO stuff. This hasn’t been much of a problem since I stopped pixel peeping.

Occasionally, I do want to get a bit more detail out of the image, or I want to do magic stuff with wavelet de-noise and wavelet decompose in GIMP. There are many other raw processors which support ARW files which can be better than Lightroom. This comparison is a bit dated (Raw Photo Processor colour has been improved IMO) but you get the idea.

So to do this and keep my Lightroom Catalog sane, I’d have to do the following steps:

  • Right click on file “Show in Finder”
  • Right click on the raw file, open with Raw Photo Processor
  • Switch back to Lightroom
  • “Edit” the file with something, anything. This automatically creates a TIF and stacks it with the original file.
  • Switch back to Raw Photo Processor and process the file.
  • Overwrite the TIF file that Lightroom made

This sux, but it keeps the raw file and the processed file together at least. I got tired of this so I used Platypus and a hacky perl script to do this.

Basically, when you say “Edit in external editor” in Lightroom, it creates a TIF file and sends that to the external program. I use that filename to lookup the raw file instead.

This is totally hacky inelegant code, but it works well enough for me. You can edit it to open whatever raw processor you want, and build a little OS X application with Platypus so that you can select it from Lightroom.

I’m sure this idea is adaptable to windows machines.

Edit: problem with hosting perl scripts directly, so made this a txt

open_raw_not_tif.txt

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