Lightroom & CS3 - What's your Workflow?

I've just got this combination on m Mac and have to admit there's a couple of things I don't understand (or haven't set up right). I've not managed to find any information about this in the LR sticky, so forgive me if it's a repost.

I've managed to import my shots fine into LR (direct from the CF card) and I'm happy enough performing LR RAW/Browsing activities and sending the file to CS3 for further editing.

1) I see that LR will only send a TIF file to CS3 (so why can't it send over a CR2 file and XMP file like ACR does?)

1a) TIF files are huge. CR2 + XMP is a pretty small overhead, why am I stuck with TIF. If I delete the TIF, do I also delete the metadata?

2) Once I save the edited file (as jpg) from CS3, why isn't it visible in LR. Thinking about it, why can't CS3 save the jpg into LR (or use the Check-in feature)?

Or maybe LR/CS3 doesn't suit my earlier workflow. In which case, what's yours?

Here is a video 'PSD's and Lightroom'.
Might give some ideas.
(Note that in the video they used ProPhotoRGB with 8bpc, which is a grave error IMO: ProPhotoRGB should always be used with 16bpc)

You use PSCS3 for pixel editing. (retouching, liquify, local adjustments to name a few). Those things cannot be done on a raw, since it's actual destructive editing (pixels are changed). That's why you have to convert to a tif or psd.
Once done in PS, just save the file. This will overwrite the Tif LR created, which you won't need anyhow...

René Damkot wrote in post #4595827
You use PSCS3 for pixel editing. (retouching, liquify, local adjustments to name a few). Those things cannot be done on a raw, since it's actual destructive editing (pixels are changed). That's why you have to convert to a tif or psd.
Once done in PS, just save the file. This will overwrite the Tif LR created, which you won't need anyhow...

Yeah, this is what I'm partly unhappy with.

With my previous (Windows) workflow, I used BreezeBrowser Pro as the browser, and sent the CR2 files off to CS3. Doing that opened up ACR where I made my RAW adjustments. These were saved in an XMP file (tiny) and the CR2 file was opened in CS3 and modified using the XMP file as metadata. I didn't used to save the PSD file (since 90% of the time, I'm happy with the work I've done in CS3 and save the smaller dimensioned jpg file) - if I wanted to reprocess the shot, I'd start from the RAW+XMP again.

In the new way of doing things, it looks like I'm stuck with a 50Mb+ TIF (or PSD) file and the original CR2 file. Thing might be slightly better if I didn't have to save the large file after processing.

You could of course flatten the tif, and convert to 8bpc before saving.
Would kinda defeat the purpose though IMO, but would save a few Mb.

I've always saved the layered psd files when doing mayor edits, so nothing changed for me in that regard...

René Damkot wrote in post #4595935
You could of course flatten the tif, and convert to 8bpc before saving.
Would kinda defeat the purpose though IMO, but would save a few Mb.

I've always saved the layered psd files when doing mayor edits, so nothing changed for me in that regard...

I guess that I'll have to get used to the way that LR wants me to work, even though it's eating up disk space somewhat needlessly for me (since I'm not a pro, I don't need to preserve my edits). Personally, I'd prefer to just keep the CR2 and XMP files and the resultant jpg file.

It's particularly annoying that the output jpg file isn't booked into LR once saved from CS3.

I think you could import it after saving, right? Not sure if you could get it stacked with the CR2 then however...

René Damkot wrote in post #4596396
I think you could import it after saving, right? Not sure if you could get it stacked with the CR2 then however...

I agree. Just seems a bit clunky for Adobe to assume that you won't be exporting to jpg and want your output files to be archived along with your source and working files.