using adobe psd files in lightroom classic

Lightroom has supported the ability to preview and manage existing PSB files for years now, but it was always missing a critical piece of the puzzle – the ability to create new layered edits as PSB files. With the old workflow, you could only choose TIF or PSD formats, which are limited to 4GB and 2GB, respectively. That’s very limiting when using smart objects for completely non-destructive workflows, exposure blending, make massive prints, have a 100 mega pixel camera. It is not uncommon for me get close or exceed this file size limit when using my Hasselblad equipment and making panoramas that involve focus stacking.

When I approach or hit his limit, things go crazy. Photoshop will stop and throw an ‘error’ when you cross that threshold. At that point you have two choices: simplify the image (such as flattening layers) or do a new save as PSB (in which case you’ll have to import it to Lightroom and will probably want to hunt down the old TIF to delete it).

Now LrC v15.1, you no longer need to worry about this problem. Simply choose PSB for all your new edits (under Prefs > External Editing). When you right-click your RAW file and choose to “edit in” Photoshop, you’ll be saving a PSB file. No more file size limits.

And if you are ok saving files which are ~2x larger, you can also increase the speed of your file saves by 10-20x! Compression is typically required when managing the limits of TIF / PSD, but truly optional when saving as PSB. That image that takes 60s to save? You may only need 3 now (because the bottleneck wasn’t writing to the drive, it was the compression calculations). In Photoshop, go to Prefs > File Handling and check “disable compression of PSD and PSB files“

Are there any downsides to PSB? You may find 3rd-party software does not support it as well or that sometimes your preview does not look correct in a file explorer. That’s about it. In my experience, file sizes are very similar when comparing TIF and PSB (including with “maximize compatibility,” which is required to see the preview in LrC). So, if you only do basic editing in Photoshop and browser your images in Explorer/Finder often, you might not want to adopt this change. But this is a completely safe thing to do, even if you’re worried about other software (Affinity supports it just fine). You can always re-save a PSB as a TIF if you need to use the image elsewhere (you might need to flatten layers with the limits of TIF, but you would have done that already and now you have a better PSB file for editing as needed). I have been using PSB for well over five years and never once had an issue – but I’ve had many headaches when I started working as a TIF and then hit the limit.

For me, if I am opening a Hasselblad file in PS, I will start the edit from the beginning as an PSD file and not look back. If it is a Nikon file, I usually stay with TIFF. This saves be some storage room.