Ok, Yes, it has been awhile since I posted. I have continued to enjoy photography even picking up a new camera or lens now and then. I also enjoyed publishing several blurb books with success exceeding my expectations. However, today’s post is about a solution for the nagging new problem Lightroom 4 introduced, the failing external edit.

I was one of those that upgraded from Lightroom 3.6 (I have been a Lightroom fanatic since version 1.2) and was introduced to the failed external edit function. I use all of the NIK products for Lightroom and love them as well as Photoshop Elements. However, I could not get Lightroom 4 to perform any external edit. The dialog box asking for the choice of using the original file or a copy would never show. I tried various posted solutions: removing the plist files for photoshop, creating blank plist files, uninstalling and installing photoshop elements, and on and on.

The solution that worked for me, with no tweaking, was installing the Lightroom 4.1 Release Candidate. While this is further than a beta, it is still subject to modification before final release. However, it allows me to work with the external editors I have come to rely on.

Everyone seems to have a different solution. I hope this helps some of you enabling the use of version 4.0, a great new release.