When exporting files back to Lightroom from Photolab 6, there is a dropdown to select which version of Lightroom to export to. I participate in Adobe’s Pre-release program, so I have a pre-release version of Lightroom installed (in addition to the current release version), and Photolab doesn’t allow me to select anything but the pre-release version to export back to.
Since I don’t use the pre-release as my day-to-day version (early pre-release builds are not recommended for production work), this is causing a major headache. I’m transferring images to Photolab for noise reduction from the release version of Lightroom Classic, but Photolab is then opening the pre-release version on export.
I’m wondering why this dropdown menu even exists if it can’t distinguish between 12.x versions of Lightroom Classic. More importantly, why can’t Photolab recognize which version of Lightroom Classic is currently running and export to that automatically?
Since what you are doing is non-standard, why would it expect PhotoLab to see more than one version of Lightroom installed? It probably picks the prerelease version because it has the higher version number.
If you setup an export to application in PL you can then select which application you would like to export to. On windows this means you can select your .exe to run so you would then select the appropriate version of LR to export to.
I can understand why PL might pick the wrong version, but I don’t understand why it presents a dropdown - implying that it can give you a choice of which version to use - but then not actually let you pick another version. It also seems odd that, in a workflow where images are transferred from LRC to PL, then exported back, that PL wouldn’t know to export to the copy of Lightroom that is actually running.
In any case, @KeithRJ’s reply got me searching for exactly where to define an application to export to, and once I found that, I was able to point it at the release version of Lightroom Classic. Thanks to @KeithRJ for getting me pointed in the right direction!
Difficult to understand and even more so considering that it had worked a while ago, when I had several versions of LrC installed. All of those were official releases though.
Can you target different versions of LrC when you launch DPL directly, i.e. without using the plugin in Lightroom?
Even when launching PL directly, I’m only offered the pre-release version of LrC in the dropdown for Export to Lightroom. Fortunately, adding the release version via Export to Application works for my purposes, but it’s still a mystery why the dropdown doesn’t offer both versions of LrC that are installed. Perhaps it only differentiates between major releases (11.x vs 12.x), but defaults to the highest point release of each?