This tip falls into the category of pretty slick but from a practical standpoint it’s not something that you will do very often. It has to do with outputting custom sized versions of images directly from Bridge/ACR without have to go into Photoshop. This is; it’s a procedure to mimic, in ACR, what can be done in Lightroom’s Export Dialog.
When CS4 was introduced the hot new feature in ACR was the ability to perform localized edits. With this added capability, for many images, there was no compelling reason to bring the image into Photoshop for additional editing. All edits could be completed in ACR.
Until recently I thought that the only way to specify the size of the output was with the Workflow Options link at the bottom middle of the ACR dialog. It looks like a hyperlink and when you click it the Workflow Options dialog opens. This is where you specify how you want your image sent to Photoshop or output directly as a tif or jpg file. In addition to specifying the size the Color Space, Bit Depth, Resolution, and Level of Sharpening can be changed.
The problem is that there are very few size options. And there is no obvious way to specify the exact size that you might want to print or to used for display purposes. And as a result I always questioned the usefulness of the Save Image option at the bottom left of the ACR dialog. If you can’t specify the exact size you want; you will have to open the new version in Photoshop in order to resize it. So why not just hit Open Image (Object) on the right and open in Photoshop and resize there?
But just a few weeks ago I discovered a way to specify an exact size. It’s done through the Crop Tool. The Crop Tool has an option dialog to set the crop size and in it there is an option for Custom Crop. Clicking it will bring up the Custom Crop dialog. In this dialog you can set the exact size as ratio, pixels, or in inches. You would use pixels to set the size for display (web, email, projection). (See an older post to learn why pixel dimensions are all you need to specify for output destined from display use. And you could use inches, along with the resolution setting in the Workflow Option, to set print size.
In the screen capture I’ve used the Custom Crop to resize this image for use in this blog; sized to 300×450 pixels. (If I were going to really going to output this as a jpg for use in this blog I would also change the Color Space Option to sRGB).
Compared to the Export Dialog in Lightroom this is a pretty clunky way of getting there but using the combination of Custom Crop options and Workflow Options it is possible to “export” a new version of an image directly out of ACR in the size and format you want.