Misirlou,
While I'm not disagreeing with the decision, I'm not sure Adobe would agree that was the design point. Clearly folks using LR are doing so for the RAW processing, something not many P&S shooters would do (assuming the even have RAW). That said, there had to be an expectation that folks would be shooting at 800, 1600, and perhaps even 3200. It isn't only the NR. You can mess up a fairly good image with just the sharpening tools, creating that same "Watercolor" effect. I agree, plugins would be nice, but there again, most are dealing with JPG, TIFF, not RAW. Thanks for responding. Shows up over on the Adobe forum as well..
Jay S.
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Yeah, there are a lot of things I do to my images that aren't available in LR, obviously. I really like the whole idea of non-destructive editing though. I suppose making the LR sharpening and noise tools more robust would only be possible up to a point. Eventually, the instructions for really sophisticated processing might become too complex to do without changing pixels. I agree that many shooters are probably happy with the noise and sharpening tools in LR now, but I'm not at 3200 ISO in a 20D.
I'm hoping LR (or Photoshop) will eventually reach a point where we can process images completely without changing the original pixels. Then go back and swap out demosaicing routines, lens corrections, etc. as technology improves. Just keep tweaking the developing recipe forever. Kind of like the way we used to do with printing from film in the old days...
If you think about it, we've only scratched the surface of digital imaging possibilities. A few years ago, I wondered if it might be possible to design simpler lenses full of all sorts of optical faults that could be processed out automatically at a later time. Maybe designers could drastically reduce the number of elements, for example. That way, the lens could be smaller, lighter, and much cheaper to manufacture. The captured image would be terrible, but the right software could remove the known problems later. Maybe that's the direction Hasselblad is taking with the H3D.