Why are my Lightroom 3 developments displaying in some applications but not others?

Question

I'm shooting timelapse photos in JPEG and Ive imported them using Lightroom 3. They were initially upside down so I flipped them around added some exposure and saturation adjustments. I selected all the photos and saved the metadata. Now when I look at the photos inside the finder I see an accurate thumbnail and when I open a photo in the Preview application it looks correct. However, when I import my JEPG sequence into After Effects in order to render a timelapse video my photos are upside down and don't have my exposure/color adjustments. I tried opening the image sequence in Quicktime 7 to see if it was just AE but the same thing happened.

Am I doing something wrong? Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

Lightroom doesn't change the original image; it stores all of its changes in a "sidecar" file with an XMP extension. Most of Adobe's applications (After Effects seems to be an exception) will read in both the image file and its associated XMP sidecar, and some third-party applications do as well. But since the original image file (whether that's a JPEG or raw file) hasn't been touched, when it is opened alone by another application, it will still be in its original, pristine state. (The two files -- the original and the XMP -- will normally be combined when the image is exported or saved as a copy, so any image adjustments and additional EXIF-compatible metadata will become part of the new image.)

Answer 2

Stan's explanation is correct; the actual image content of the original JPEG files hasn't been changed. So what you need to do is "Export" the images from Lightroom. This will write out new JPEG files that reflect all of the changes you've made. In the Library module of Lightroom, select all of the images you're working with, then click Export.... Make sure the drop-down at the top of the Export dialog says Export to: Hard Drive. The Export dialog has numerous options, including the Export Location where the exported files should go. If you're making a movie, you may also want to use the Image Resizing section to reduce the size of the images (for example, to 1920x1080 for 1080p video). That should save some processing time when you build the time-lapse.