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Chapter 9: How to Save Your Images
Using Lightroom’s Export
Getting photos into Lightroom is easy. Editing them is easy. Doing slide shows is…well…let’s skip that one for now. Printing is easy. Organizing is easy. You know what’s not easy? Finding the Save menu command inside of Lightroom. Yeah, you know, you’ve made some edits to your image in the Develop module and want to save those changes, so you go under the File menu to look for Save, but it’s just not there. You see, Lightroom is the “Hotel California” of applications, in that you can edit any time you like, but you can never have your image actually leave Lightroom—it’s in here for life. It’s like the “pen” (well, at least that’s what my cellmate called it when we were thrown in Leavenworth for trying to take a tilt-rotor V-22 Osprey out for a joyride with the admiral’s daughter). Anyway, while it seems that not having a Save command would mean your images can never leave Lightroom, that’s just not the case. Adobe just uses a different word for it. Go under the File menu, under Jailbreak, and choose Breakout, Spontaneous Parole, or Bust Out. This brings up the Warden dialog, where you choose where you want your file saved (your choices are: a halfway house or your ex-boyfriend’s/ex-girlfriend’s house). You think I’m making this stuff up? Okay, I am, but I don’t want you to think I am, because then you’ll stop buying my books, and then I won’t have any money to bribe the prison guards to keep my Creative Cloud subscription active. Before CC came out, they were fine taking a pack of cigarettes, but if you try to bribe them now with some smokes, they’ll make you get a Lightroom 4 tattoo across your knuckles. That’s the last thing you want in the “cooler.”