Adobe just added an incredibly helpful update to Lightroom Classic (LrC) v15.1…

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 if you use smart objects for completely non-destructive workflows, exposure blending, make massive prints, have a 100 megapixel camera, etc.

Things get messy when you run into that limit. Photoshop will stop throw an error when you cross that threshold. Your only choice at that point is to either simplify the image (such as flattening layers) or to 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 have 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“.

The PSB file format (also known as “large document format” in PS) works exactly like a TIF inside Adobe software, keeping all your layers and complex information – but it has no file size limit! Ok, there is a limit of 300,000 pixels per side (good enough for an 83′ print) or 4 exabytes (ie 1 billion times larger than the limits of TIF). We should be good for a while.

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. File sizes are very similar in my experience 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 go, 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 TIF and then hit the limit.

Other updates in LrC v15.1:

This update contains a mix of other nice quality of life improvements including:

• improved quality for previews in the import dialog
• expanded support for new cameras, lens profiles, and tethering support for more Leica cameras
• batch renaming may be undone via ctrl/cmd-Z
• bug fixes and more