A couple of weeks back, my friend Jeremy Hicks was demonstrating Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to me. Whilst I’m still not convinced that Lightroom is the answer to all my digital image editing requirements, it it great for managing my digital workflow – and it has the advantage of being integrated with my pixel editor of choice: Adobe Photoshop CS3.

Unfortunately I found that, whilst Lightroom’s Photo menu included Edit In options for Adobe Photoshop CS3, some of the options that would be useful when merging multiple exposures – Merge to Panorama, Merge to HDR and Open as Layers – were all greyed out (unavailable). After a bit of Internet research, I found that I needed to be running an updated version of Photoshop CS3 (v10.0.1) to enable the integration with Lightroom. Some people have also suggested that Lightroom needs to be at least v2.1 (I’m running v2.3).

After the upgrade, the options to in the words of a former Senior Marketing Manager for Professional Photography at Adobe, Frederick Van Johnson) (“leverage the power of Photoshop CS3 to do some of the more complex and niche ‘heavy-lifting’ imaging tasks, while still providing seamless access to the powerful organizational features in Lightroom 2” were available.

Not surpisingly, Lightroom v2.3 (and presumably earlier versions too) are perfectly happy to work with later versions of Photoshop, such as CS4 (v11).