Naw, they've already passed that crossroad a long time ago when they decided, in the fall of 2005, to actually go ahead and do Lightroom. Now that Adobe _HAS_ produced it, Adobe is committed, strongly, to continuing Lightroom without too much regard to the potential impact on it's other products. Photoshop really doesn't have too much competition in its core marketplace, graphics(photographers actually make up a minority % of Photoshop users). Naw, I really don't think you all need to worry over much that Adobe WON'T keep pushing both Lightroom _AND_ Photoshop to do more, better, faster. That sort of work is really in Adobe's DNA...
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Jeff, I'm delighted to hear it. I also agree with the comments about the difference between Photoshop and Lightroom that were offered by others in this thread, but I'd add one more.
Photoshop is deep, rich, capable of a zillion amazing functions --
Photoshop is also intimidating and very difficult to learn to use, even for an advanced amateur. (The comment in this thread that what is really needed is a complete overhaul of the UI of Photoshop is absolutely dead-on. It is Photoshop that needs a complete overhaul, after years of just piling on one feature on top of another, even more than Lightroom needs to enhanced.)
With a few more changes and improvements, Lightroom could become a very effective replacement for Photoshop for many advanced amateurs. Yes, it means you'll be limited to global adjustments, etc. But for many of us, for many prints, that will suffice 80% of the time.
Advanced amateurs gravitate to Lightroom because it is more user-friendly than Photoshop. Easier to learn and faster to use. (And the absolutely excellent tutorials by Jeff and Michael should be recommended to anyone new to Lightroom.)
Personally, I don't want Lightroom to become a junior version of Photoshop. That would be a disaster, and would move in the direction of making it difficult to use and not very user friendly -- just like Photoshop.
Fix and enhance the functions it already has, and Lightroom will evolve from a great program to an awesome program. I now use five programs to accomplish the below. Fix the below, and I will only use Lightroom 80% of the time. I believe that is consistent with the message from Jeff Schewe. I'm definitely not in the camp to trash Lightroom.
Here are my top five choices for improvements, and I am really making these in the hope that Jeff is reading, since he can provide input into the Lightroom developers:
(1) Output sharpening. Maybe Photokit Sharpening for Lightroom is right around the corner? Jeff, you'd make a fortune. In the case of Photoshop, Photokit is competing with the native abilities of Photoshop. Lightroom has no ability to do output sharpening, at least not on a serious level. Everyone who uses Lightroom would buy the product. Pixelgenius would need a larger server to accommodate all the sales and downloads.
If Pixelgenius doesn't do it, how about all of the other software developers? There is a serious market for such a product.
(2) Get rid of the really dumb import limit under which images cannot exceed 10,000 pixels in any dimension. Geez, I'm just an amateur, but I have panos that exceed that. Panos are a hot topic and a growth area for photography. Lightroom has to be able to handle long panos that can often exceed that limitation, such as only three 1Ds files stitched together. Maybe it means that a full preview is not possible. But why not allow imports of completed tiffs, and then show them using thumbnails? Then those files could at least be catalogued and printed from Lightroom. This is a really dumb design decision that basically means that a complete catalogue is not possible within Lightroom. It is the equivalent of the NY Public Library banning books exceeding a given page length. This has to be one of the really dumb, self-inflicted, Achilles heels of Lightroom.
(3) Soft proofing.
(4) Lightroom should import WAV files created on Canon Pro bodies, and be able to play them back when the shots are reviewed, rather than throwing them away and failing to import them. LATER EDIT -- Note below posting from ilyons -- audio files are now imported and can be played, but are buried within the metadata, of version 1.1. Adobe made this change but apparently didn't tell anyone! It would be nice if they included icons in the grid view with tags for the audio files though, as explained below. That's how Photo Mechanic handles audio files, so you can easily spot which of your files include the audio files.
(5) Better noise reduction. Another need that could be addressed by Noise Ninja or Noiseware. Competition is a great thing. Which one will address this need first, and gain a huge jump on the competition?
I'm sure others have their own list of favorites.
I only want to see the features it already has enhanced. Right now, it has output sharpening, but it doesn't work. It has a library cataloging function, but it bans and burns large books thereby defeating the purpose of a master catalogue. (Woops, I meant that it censors and refuses to import large panos). It has a great print dialogue, but it doesn't let you soft proof before printing. And it has a great import function, but at the present time fails to import all of the files created by the top-of-the-line Canon pro bodies. It has noise reduction, but it is very weak.
I'm in the camp to get a few modest improvements to make it even better.
(We had a thread that was dedicated to a list of requests for improving Lightroom 1.0 that appears to have died. I will add the above to a new thread dedicated to a compilation of revisions to version 1.3. I hope that doesn't constitute "cross-posting" since that I assume that referred to posting the same message in two forums, rather than two threads in the same forum.)