And that's your right. Look, the Lightroom engineers can only do what they can do. LR 1.1 was required for a variety of bug fixes and functionality enhancements-which meant that that other work went undone. What current Lightroom feature would you give up in exchange for point editing? Prolly not mergable catalogs, prolly not sharpening, prolly not a lot that is in 1.1 that ain't in 1.0.
Want will always take a backseat to need. So, unless you can elevate a want to a need, it will remain optional as apposed to mission critical.
Can you get really great output now from Lightroom? Would a point editor make a big difference? Prove it. Try to find use cases where Camera Raw can do a substantially better job than Lightroom.
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Jeff,
As you might remember, I was not too enthousiastic about LR in the past for various reasons having to do with the need to import data and the lack of opening to other raw converters (I see that DxO is now proposing an intregration which is great).
This being said, I have to admit that the quality of the conversions in 1.1 is now excellent and have to acknowledge the fact that it is possible to get great results with 1.1. It works especially well with my ZD files as long as the exposures are reasonnably short.
Now, the main reasons why I think I need point curves in Lightroom nonetheless are:
- point control enables me to increase the local contrast of an image exactly where it has to be done based on the actual histogram. The current sliders work on pre-defined areas of the curve that do not always meet the actual needs of an image.
How about those high key images that do not have a lot of information in the lower 25% of the histogram but where more contrast is needed elsewhere for instance?
Since this is currently not easy to do - or at least I haven't found an easy way to do it - you often end up having to apply more global curves inside PS, which defeats the very purpose of LR as a comprehensive global image modification engine. Multiple curve application can only increase the entropy of the image and should be avoided.
- highlight control - we all know that those brightest bits can often make or break an image, especially those shot with natural light. I believe that this has been mentioned by others also,
- consistency with ACR. I am not yet sold on the idea that I need to batch import all my images in Lightroom, especially all the legacy ones. Using ACR on those is much faster and I would typically use point control for those images. I'd like to be able to stick the same workflow for those new images I'll handle with Lightroom,
- consistency with other RAW converters like Capture NX,
- I am used to working with point curve.
Regards,
Bernard