To begin, for everyone in the US, and Americans everywhere else, Happy 4th of July!

Lightroom handles a surprising amount of my workflow these days, but I do still find myself in Photoshop on a regular basis. One reason, and one that many others have expressed frustration with, is soft proofing before output. Normally, you’d need to export your image to Photoshop, and then select the proofing conditions you want to simulate prior to printing. Not a big deal by any means, but it’s a couple of extra steps and when you’re busy, every step slows you down.
To get around this, I’ve started to use droplets. If you’re not familiar with droplets, they’re essentially Photoshop actions that have been exported as a package that launches Photoshop and performs those steps. I’ve created an action for each of the papers I commonly print on. Then, selecting File > Automate > Create Droplet I save the droplet to my Lightroom Export Actions folder (located in Application Support > Adobe > Export Actions. Be sure that you don’t have the Override Action Open Commands selected or your image won’t open when the action is run.

Now in Lightroom, you’ll select one or more images and choose Export. Scroll down to the bottom of the Export dialog to the Post Processing options. Click on After Export and if you’ve copied the droplets to the correct location, you’ll see them in the list of available actions.

The end result is that Photoshop is launched with my image open and the proofing settings applied. You can apply this same principal to many other tasks you find yourself heading into Photoshop to handle. While it’s not as convenient as having these commands within Lightroom itself, and you obviously need to also have Photoshop, it can save you a significant amount of time with commonly performed tasks.

If you have other shortcuts you find useful, I'd love to hear about them.