New website lets you look at how jpeg images were edited in lightroom

If you've ever seen a photo and wondered about what editing was done to it, a new website can help you out.

Piotr Chmolowski has launched Pixel Peeper, a website that reads EXIF data from JPEG images and instantly shows what process was used for editing in Lightroom, as well as the camera settings.

As Piotr explains on Reddit, when he returned to taking photos after a long break, he was amazed by the editing skills of the photographers whose work he admired. He would often ask himself “how do they do it?” and realized that the info is, in most cases, right in the file.

Since Lightroom saves all the adjustments in EXIF data by default (unless you disable it), he used this data from other photographers’ photos to experiment with his own images. Eventually, he built his own website that 'scrapes' this data and shows how an image was edited.

All you have to do is drag and drop the JPEG in to his website and it will produce out all of the data it can find. The site uses JavaScript to extract the data, so the response is instant and the image is never uploaded anywhere.

If you do want to try and recreate a look, in theory you could follow the changes step-by-step to copy it and understand which settings do what. Even the creator of the website himself says he’s learned a lot about editing this way.

Finally if you were wondering if it’s possible for Photoshop – it isn’t. As Piotr explains, this is because Photoshop doesn’t embed this kind of metadata. It's worth noting some social networks and websites remove the EXIF data from photos, so you won’t have any readings from most social sites either.