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My Short Wish List for Lightroom
I've had a hell of a week. Last week was spent in Las Vegas at PMA, the big annual photo trade show. If you've been to a trade show, you know they can be a grind. Solid meetings for a couple of days, and then there are those glamorous parties to attend. So, I shouldn’t have been surprised to come home sick as a dog with the flu (evidently what happens in Vegas doesn’t always stay in Vegas as my now sick wife points out).
The plus to attending PMA is the chance to see what’s new on the market, or what’s coming up in the next few months. This year there wasn’t a lot to get excited about on the hardware side, but I did see some interesting software products. So, while laying around feeling sorry for myself, I thought about some of the things I’d like to see in Lightroom moving forward.
Now don’t get me wrong - Lightroom is a great product, especially for a version 1.x application. Adobe got lots of things right, and I love the general workflow. The Raw conversion tools are the best around and I’m more organized than I ever was in the past. Still, no matter how good a program is, it seems like we always want more. Having spent over 20 years developing and testing software, I’m all for incremental improvements rather than a monolithic upgrade full of features and bugs, so hopefully these will be seen in a future release or two. With that said, here are my top three wishes for Lightroom.
- Smart Collections. Aperture has them, Elements Organizer has them, iPhoto has them. I want to create a collection that is constantly updated by criteria I specify. Example: I shoot at many different national parks and currently have collections for each of them. Currently, I have to specifically add new images to the appropriate collection. I want a smart collection that automatically adds these images based on keyword tags. This way I know I’m always current and I have one location to go to.
- File merging. I want to do HDR and panorama images directly in Lightroom. Currently, I select the images I want to work on, do as much of the editing as possible in Lightroom and then export the files to Photoshop CS3. Assuming I have a set of five images I’m working with, I now have six new images to deal with - the five exported master files, and the finished merged image, which I need to remember to Sync in order for Lightroom to show the file in my catalog.
- Customizable Print templates. The print layout tools in Lightroom are very good. What would make them excellent? The ability to create print packages would be a huge timesaver for me - I want multiple print sizes on a single page. Right now, I have to print these from either Photoshop (not the greatest solution either), or ImagePrint (great, but not cheap, and another step in the workflow). I saw plenty of book publishing companies at PMA, and would love to add this ability to Lightroom, and increase my sales.
These are my top three like to see wishes. I’d love to hear what you think, and what your top three are.
Comments (17)
#3 is my vote too!
#1 very close to keyword filtering, but also good idea.
As for me, hot topic for LR is plugin architecture for noise reduction (or providing its own high-quality NR system) and maybe possibility to add another images over photo with standart set of blending modes (very good for overprinting logos, copyrights, etc; also for adding grain textures, etc) in priting and exporting modules (Or, possible better place - as additional "postprocessing" module between "develop" and "print/web/export".)
I like your wishlist - nice and short! Another really nice feature to have would be dual monitor support. The only reason why I havent yet bought a second monitor is that Lightroom wont support it :-P
1. Propper auto-devolopment of NEFs with all the in-camera settings
2. have a switch for stacks that make all meta-data updates (like tags, IPTC-data, stars) permeate all images on the stack (if you so wish)
3. Add autostacking of exposure-brackets plus HDR functionality
I'd like to see soft-proofing added, and stacks that work across folders. And support for other formats -- like Quicktime -- for slide shows.
Gotta agree with the commenters about 1) dual monitor support, and 2) other slideshow formats (especially flash, but also quicktime). Why do I have to use 3rd party solutions for formats that Adobe actually owns??
I am hoping for Pixel Genius to make a PhotoKit Sharener plug-in for Lightroom. Using that program is the main reason I often have to go to PSCS3. I would love to have it available in LR
For the metadata location browser... make 'some' fields non-mandatory (making this customisable would be ideal), so that for shots that were not taken in a 'specific' city (for example), they do not show up in the 'Unknow Location'.
I dò know where it's taken, I just can't fill out all the IPTC fields
Selected and feathered regional adjustments using the same adjustment tools. Or a LightZone plug-in that's affordable because it just does that one thing. Besides, then you could do it on a virtual copy and save a lot of disk space.
These are some great suggestions! I think we have lots to look forward to in new versions if any of these are on the list. Let's hope Adobe is thinking along the same lines.
1) Dual Monitor Support
2) Light table
3) Smart Collections
1) Local burning and dodging.
2) Soft proofing
3) HDR and Panoramas
i totally agree with your wishlist, i had been thinking about #2 myself the other day.
what i am missing quite a bit is a way to add a watermark to certain exports (like for web galleries, or flickr or so) i know you can use a photoshop action, but it would be a lot cooler if you could do it from within LR (and use for example the metadata too)
Before I forget:
Direct starting of CaptureNX from the NEF, not via "Show in explorer"
We must be able to have soft-proofing in the Print module. What's the point of a Print module if I have have to swap into Photoshop to soft-proof every time I need to print a photo?
nice wishlist jon,
i hope to see...
1. customize watermark
2. soft-proofing
3. HDR and panorama
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned this yet:
(1) Distortion correction!
This is my number one reason for firing up photoshop. It should read what lens I used and adjust accordingly, always and without asking. I find barrel distortion very ugly, and would rather my very first glimpse of the photo were free of it, so as not to upset my judgement.
(2) Light table
I'm actually trying Aperture now, just for this feature. I like it, sometimes, but I find Apple's implementation hard to use, all of a sudden you have 15 pages worth of empty space. I'd make it use a fixed paper size, start with A4 landscape or something and let you change it with a few clicks but not just by hitting the edge.
(3) Multi monitors?
But I'm not sure exactly how this should behave.
What good are print templates without Soft Proofing?