Something like this... ?
On my right click, I have "Send a copy to photoshop"....
To add it, at the foot of the "Send to (External)" list, click on "Add/Edit program..." to open the external tool manager...
Add it like so....
By selecting the "Use a copy" option, when you use it, MC will create a copy of the file beside the original, appending "_EDIT" to the original filename, stack it with the original as the "top of stack" file, and then open it for editing in photoshop. So long as the folder is in the auto import watched folders list, when you save the changes to this file, MC will pick them up and update the thumbnail accordingly.
If you choose to do a "Save as" in photoshop and save as .psd file, again, so long as auto import is configured to (I believe it will be by default), MC will detect and import the new .psd file. Unfortunately, that's as far as you can get automagically. Here, for you, I'm stepping through my own instructions, where you can see the psd file just imported beneath the stack that contains the two jpg files....
Now, to stack these, you would select both, right click, and depending on what you want, choose one of the following...
Stacks > Auto stack by name will prompt you for a preferred file type to be "top of stack" (ie. visible), and you would enter psd and continue.
Stacks > Add file to stack will simply add the psd file to the stack, but not as top file.
"Auto stack by name" is great if you have many to do at once.
Notes:- If you also create a "Send to > External > Photoshop" entry as detailed above, but without selecting the "use a copy" option, MC will open the actual file in photoshop. If you then save that as a psd file, the original will remain intact and MC will auto import the new psd file. You now have a third stacking option where you would simply select both files, right click, "Stacks > Stack files". The neat thing here is that MC will place the file you right clicked upon as the "top of stack" file.
- If you use the "create a copy" option, the copy is created, tags and all, and MC picks these up too, but when you save the jpg file from photoshop, the tags are lost from the file, remaining only in the MC database. If this is important to you, you must do an "Update tags from library" on these files to re-write the tags.
- psd files are imported without tags, which means you will need a view based on filename to list the parent and child together as they will have little else in common.
- You can update the database by copying the original file (ctrl+c) then select the psd file and press ctrl+shift+v to paste the tags to it from the original.
- I'm a long way from default install here. My pictures folder in MC's auto import list is set to apply the following rule to the [name] field when importing files: =removeright([filename (name),4) I'm sure this is here because I wasn't happy with what carnac was doing with image filenames when importing. You may or may not need this. For "Auto stack" to work, the names of the files in MC must be the same.
Too much? Maybe. Once you have it all set up the way you want, that's it and you just get on with using it, and once set up, then yes, I would say that making a stacked psd version is easy, and no, you don't have to do it all manual, only some of it 
Some more on stacks and their behaviour in MC can be found here and here.
If you have any other questions regarding MC and images, don't hesitate to ask, we'll do our best to help.
-marko.
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Topic: Best way to stack images (Read 1019 times)