Lightroom to Photoshop and back logic

Question

Hi Lightroom/Photoshop wizards,
I work in LR and PS CC.  I am now working for someone else and want to make sure that our edited images end up in lightroom after editing in a logical manner so that we can easily see which images will be used for our photo albums.
Here is how I am working:
Import photos into LR, give 4 star rating to images that will go into album
Make some LR edits
Edit photo with PS (directly from LR)
Save image in PS
go through all images to hand pick the ones that I want in the album (now there are copies) This is the part where everything falls apart.  I end up with redundant files and I can't distinguish the finished ones (other than looking one by one to determine the correct version to use).  Is there a logical way to handle this?
Export to separate "album" folder selected images
Also, one extra question, If I am working with high res jpegs (rather than raw), how do I maintain the size of the files?  I exported original file and it did not carry with it any changes made in Lightroom.
Thanks!
Lisa

Answer 1

I am sorry if I was not clear. I was thinking that there might be a quick and simple way to identify or flag images that I want to track for say and album.  I want to eliminate any confusion or taking the wrong version of a file.  Perhaps I should just ask what a reliable, logical workflow is when working in LR/PS round tripping.  Perhaps making PS edits first, then Lr changes?  I want the simplest, cleanest, logical, least amount of confusion when working on images for an album.  Having 2 or 3 versions of the same image can lead to confusion.  Some of our images will not be edited in PS, others will.
No, you certainly want to edit photos in LR first, and then if necessary send them to PS for additional edits that are not available in LR.
I'm still not clear about "eliminate any confusion". What confusion? As I said, the photos that have been edited by PS will have the word "edit" in the file name, while the photos that have not been sent to Photoshop will not have "edit" in the file name. Also, when you send a file to PS, you can ask LR to stack the PS edited version with the version that has not been sent to PS, thus keeping the pair side-by-side in the Library module.
My second question is exporting out jpegs without losing any resolution - basically copying the files to another folder for example "edited album images" folder and keeping them in the lr database.  Is there a way to do this through Lr?  When I chose "export" and "original" lr edits did not carry through.
So in your first message, you spoke of file size, and now you speak of resolution. These are not the same. So which is it? To maintain the resolution, you uncheck the box that says "Resize to Fit".
I don't understand why you want to copy files to some other folder, Lightroom provides collections and keywords and plenty of other tools to allow you to organize and identify these photos for whatever purpose you want. So you would use these tools to achieve the organization of your original photos or the Photoshop edited versions of the photos. Without a clear justifcation, I would say that in most cases there is not a need to achieve organization of exported photos. Furthermore there is no "copy" command in Lightroom (except at import which we don't seem to be talking about).
Reading between the lines, it sounds like you want to export to save your edits and then maintain some organization of your edited photos? Is that  correct? As I said, there is no need to do this (nor is it an effective way to proceed). You perform the organization of your photos in Lightroom, no need to export simply to organize. Exporting is performed when the photo is needed outside of Lightroom for some non-Lightroom purpose (e.g. e-mail, web, print, use in some other program).