Workflow with 2 computers and Photoshop

[elliot]

I'm a new user, and a longtime Lightroom user.  I own Photoshop CS5, and am weaning myself away from LR because I find Adobe Camera Raw a lot faster to post.  PM+ACR>LR in technical terms.

I have two questions:
1) A lot of wedding/event/sport photographers take a hundreds or thousands of photos that they need to sort thought, maybe even onsite, and do it on a laptop.  I want to do the same thing: sort through them on a laptop, but then post process the keepers later on the bigger desktop.  I don't know if I want to transfer all of them to the desktop or only the keepers.  What do you do?  Load all photos on both machines, then transfer the ratings from one to the other?  Or copy from one machine to the other?

2) For those of you who also have forsaken Lightroom: do you set your editor to be Photoshop, and edit in ACR a few at a time?  Or do you bulk transfer the first round of keepers into Bridge, and go from there, with PM having done it's job, and a job well done?

3) (Bonus question) When I save into jpg from PM, it doesn't use the RAW settings from ACR; it saves from the original.  Is that by design, or do I not have a setting set?  Once I take a photo into ACR, I print from there or PS?

Thank you.
--Elliot

[Kirk Baker]

Elliot,

3) (Bonus question) When I save into jpg from PM, it doesn't use the RAW settings from ACR; it saves from the original.  Is that by design, or do I not have a setting set?

ACR does not update the RAW photo with your adjustments.  Photo Mechanic does not have access to Adobe's proprietary RAW rendering engine and uses the JPEG preview embedded into RAW files.  If you want to see your adjustments in PM, either save as a JPEG with the same base name as the RAW file, or use the DNG format which Adobe's software does update the embedded preview.

-Kirk

[Eric]

Elliot,

I have done HUGE events (biggest generated 100k files over 2 weeks). The best solution we came up with was to edit on the laptops by folder and either copy the folder to the desktop or to FTP the selects to our server so that they would be ready for final post processing when we got back to the office. There isn't a way (at least not that I have found) to keep multiple machines automatically sync'd.

Eric