The Future of Lightroom

[ButchM]

What makes LR difficult to replace is not that it is popular. What makes LR difficult to replace is that it is of high quality.

That's purely a subjective view. The evidence is there are some very talented professional photographers who produce quite exquisite work that have never, ever used an Adobe product to do so. While that group is few in number, they do exist. Which is why I used the term 'popular' ... there are other options. How those options fit an individual users perspective is purely a subjective opinion.

[jjj]

Personally I'd be happy if Adobe removed all the other modules and just left Library, Development and printing...and just focus on those. I have no needs for the likes of books or slide shows out of LR. I use other products for these purpose...products whose sole feature is either creating books or developing slide shows. I don't want LR heading towards a kitchen sink approach as when you do that you spread your resources thin, bloat your product and lose focus of what LR really is.

If I had a vote, i'd remove the peripheral modules and focus on the main ones.

+1

Just as well that selfish people like you two don't get one.

[jjj]

Sure it has had those other modules for a long time and you can see how much Adobe actually values them...not much. Better to get rid of they are not valued. As they sit right now, they just take up space.

As far as Bridge being as capable as LR...not even close. I can say the same with book or slideshow software...they existed before LR was even released.

Actually without the modules you think are unnecessary, they indeed very close indeed.

[jjj]

I don't believe in the kitchen sink approach where everything I ever want to do with an image needs to be done from a single application developed by the same group of resources. This leads to bloat wear and not the best in class in any of the modules. I'd rather have Adobe concentrate on the core modules and make them best in class rather than dilute their resources over a wide range of features and not excel at anything.

There are reasons why plugins like NIK are so popular...it is because their teams were focused on a single application and they excelled at it while the LR resources were scattered over a much larger feature space and lacked finness in any of them.

Why not add Video editing and production into LR? What about music editing and production? What about web design using your images...the sky is the limit...what makes slideshows and book designs any different.

Let's make this do-it-all...but nothing very well product...no thanks.

Looks like you've completely and utterly missed the point of LR and BTW you can already do web design in LR.
As for your other daft suggestions, LR is an image editor/manager and the current modules are all for dealing with image files and how they typically get used, nothing superfluous about any of them. Suggesting adding irrelevant things like music production is only underlying how you simply do not grok what LR is for.
The huge benefit of the the LR approach is that you can do most of what you need to do in one place, not having to roundtrip files back and for to other software.
Removing roundtripping is one of the best workflow improvements that can be made to any software where they are several different kinds of work that may be done with the files involved. If when laying out my book or website I realise that an image may need tweaking, I simply alter it in Dev module it and carry on without any faffing with the exporting of unnecessary duplicates and importing/replacing stuff and all the time consuming issues surrounding such an antiquated workflow.

I've been been learning Da Vinci's Resolve of late where integrating its high end grading and now full editing of video in one piece of software is like the transformation LR did for stills when it replaced the separate organisation and working with images paradigm that preceded it.
Resolve also has some neat grading tools that would be nice in to use with still images.

[hjulenissen]

That's purely a subjective view. The evidence is there are some very talented professional photographers who produce quite exquisite work that have never, ever used an Adobe product to do so. ...

There are some very talented professional photographers who produce exquisite work that never enters the digital domain.

I don't see how that is relevant? The point is that LR is a quite efficient means of producing good results. Many professionals and dedicated enthusiasts can and choose to make something useful out of LR. Even someone like myself who do not spend many hours a day honing my photo skills (I have a dayjob) can make something useful out of LR.

Being able to cover that span is quite impressive. Which is not to say that the product is "perfect", or that certain features does not annoy a large proportion of their users.

I am sort of happy that it is not my job to design a LR competitor. At the same time I cannot help but wish that someone did. Someone with a strong vision and a keen photography interest/background. Someone that listened to all of my advice ;-)

If not, I would hope that at least Adobe would allocate sufficient resources (of the right kind) so as to continually improve their product. I don't mean adding "tick-in-a-box" features, but cleverly redesigning the fundamental workflow and efficiency as they learn new things about their users. Not because their designers thinks that it is cool to do something new, but because they have a genuine belief that it will make their users more productive and satisfied.

To me, consistency is essential. Any complex product (be it software or hardware) can benefit a lot from the collective assumptions that its (target) user base has. They could be Windows users where "ctrl+c" means "copy". Or they could be used to reading from left to right. Or they could come from the "Library" module to the "Print" module assuming that interaction with common elements is consistent. Really small things that (once you do it right) allows people to avoid thinking consciously about _how_ they interact, and rather spend their precious brain resources thinking about _what_ they want to do.

For many of us, the parametric image editor approach was a big change. One that caused confusion and (possibly) frustration. For a large percentage of us, this seems to have paid of in the long run: parametric editing does have some significant advantages.

-h

[stamper]

That's purely a subjective view. The evidence is there are some very talented professional photographers who produce quite exquisite work that have never, ever used an Adobe product to do so. While that group is few in number, they do exist. Which is why I used the term 'popular' ... there are other options. How those options fit an individual users perspective is purely a subjective opinion.

If they used Adobe products then it is possible that the work could be more exquisite? Alas they will never know.

[ButchM]

There are some very talented professional photographers who produce exquisite work that never enters the digital domain.

I don't see how that is relevant?

It's relevant in the aspect that the 'art' is in the artist, not the specific tools the artist employs.

If they used Adobe products then it is possible that the work could be more exquisite? Alas they will never know.

My point wasn't that I don't think Lightroom is a very capable and worthy tool ... I wouldn't use it if it wasn't. Nothing lasts forever and we ALL should have an open mind and a functional Plan B approach at the ready.

My point was two-fold:

1. If we choose to believe that there are no other possible options or those options are unworthy of consideration, we are doomed to accept whatever Adobe ultimately decides to offer ... or not offer us.

2. When you walk into a high-end gallery and you see a painting on the wall that conveys a deep connection to the content ... do you invest much (or any) time mulling over what brand/model of brush the artist used?

[Robert Roaldi]

If I were advising Apple, I might tell them that this might be a good time to re-introduce Aperture.

I wonder if the people working on After Shop Pro at Corel (formerly Bibble, I think) at Corel might also be smelling blood.

[pluton]

My point wasn't that I don't think Lightroom is a very capable and worthy tool ... I wouldn't use it if it wasn't. Nothing lasts forever and we ALL should have an open mind and a functional Plan B approach at the ready.

Words to live by.
Eight years and a half years is a long time for an evolving software to continue to be useful, without disastrous management decisions, such as the abandonment of the product's development to the marketing department.