Your Lightroom 4 Wish List Comments
Hi Gang: I wanted to do a follow-up to last Friday’s post about “What I’d Love to See in Lightroom 4” because you guys came up with so many other great feature requests, ideas and enhancements to what’s already there, I wanted to share some of the ones that really resonated with me.
There is one that would be high on my list, and I totally forgot about it, until I read Bryan’s comment: “Why no Vibrance in the Adjustment Tool?” I second that. You can leave Saturation, but add a Vibrance slider.
Also, I sent my post to Adobe’s Lightroom Product Manager Tom Hogarty, and then Tom and I talked on the phone about all this on Friday (I was just happy we were still talking). ;-)
Anyway, while I can’t go into specifics about what what Tom and I discussed, I can tell you two things: (1) Adobe is listening. Big time. At a level that was unthinkable just a few years ago. The Lightroom team is full of photographers (Tom included), and they use the program themselves, and they want the same things we want, and they’re fully committed to giving us the tools we need. And (2) I was very, very, very happy at what I heard from Tom. That’s all I’m saying.
One more thing: There were a number of features that people are asking for that are already in Lightroom, which is a good thing (and some folks kicked in with their own comments pointing them in the right direction, which is something I love about the people who frequent this blog. They want to help each other out, which is really what it’s all about).
Now, on to highlights from your comments (By the way—-Adobe is reading all your comments. These are just my favorites):
Brent
“Relative presets. I don’t want a preset that setss my exposure to 2.0. I want a preset that adds 2.0 to the current value. Most presets are useless unless the original exposure is spot on. If presets could create relative values instead of absolutes, it would be so much easier to browse through lots of different effects until you get the look you want.”Sherry
“A healing brush with Content Aware would be #1 on my list.”Trevor King
“Watermark positioning is my other gripe. V. 3.0 limits where watermarks can be positioned through the 0-10% vertical movement limitation. Please allow 25% changes in positioning so that I get my watermarks in my preferred position halfway between centre and the bottom of the image.”
Marcel
“The ability to export as a file that you can burn straight to DVD would save me hours of work when doing slideshows for clients. Being limited to a compressed file format for the web is only half way there.”Mark
“It’s not a matter of loyalty (for us photographers), it’s a matter of productivity and competitive advantage. Come on, Adobe…blow us away…and SOON, please.”Eric Cote
“You forgot the most important: a real healing brush instead of the spot healing we have at the moment.”Doug
“Make it easier to create folders and subfolders in the library. How about a right-click, new folder? I know, that’s so 1992.”Levi Sim
“Clone Stamp. that’s all I want. I would never have to leave LR if it had the clone stamp tool.”KC
“Identity Plates should snap to guides and grids. Photo boxes will snap to guides, but not to grids.”Cindy
“I miss the ability to use more than one song in Slideshow, especially when I have more than three minutes worth of images to watch. Why was that ability changed?”Simon
“Make the “Ad-hoc slideshow” [Impromptu] performance what it should be, in e.g. picasa I can just hit slideshow and it instantly starts showing. In LR 3, I first have to wait minutes while ‘preparing…’ That isn’t ad-hoc slideshow to me…”Bill Gommel
“How about the ability to search multiple catalogs. My catalog is getting huge because I want to be able to search for a certain class images. It would be nice to have a wedding catalog, a portrait catalog, an every day catalog, but if I want to search for all images with keyword Chicago it would search all three catalogs.”Robbie R.
“I’d love to see White Balance adjustment added to the adjustment brush tool. It would be great for fixing those shots where we have mixed light sources.”Piet Van den Eynde
“The ability to fade a preset in Lightroom: just apply a preset, and have ‘preset strenght’ slider to add to the effect or diminish it. Also allow one or two levels of extra hierarchy to store presets in… Right now, there’s only one folder level… People with lots of presets have to scroll through endless lists…”John Swarce
“Make the updating of watermarks easier. If I create a watermark and I make any later change to it (say…moving it from one side of the picture to the other side because it looks better), I have to save it as a new watermark. I could see if I changed the text or style, but just the positioning? I suppose I could create seperate watermarks as “Left Bottom”, “Right Bottom”, “Top Right, Vertical Orientation”, etc. but this would get messy really quickly.”Brendan
“How about a larger navigator window so we can better see presets being applied. Paul adds:
Even better yet, how about an option to preview presets in the original image. The tiny navigator window just doesn’t cut it.”Michael Tissington
“Stacks need improving … there needs to be a way of selecting the entire stack without expanding it first (and it does not need to expand, just because I have it selected).”Ian Butterworth
“It would be nice if they could take the “backup” even further and backup all the settings, colour profiles, develop settings, plugins in use, etc. as they are scattered in different directories. In fact I wish Photoshop would do this too. Backup anything I have configured easily so if I did a fresh install I could restore the backup and have everything how it was.”Waldek Chadzynski
“Please don’t forget about [the] request from Matt Kloskowski about being able to move vignette all around a picture.” [thanks Waldek—-I forgot about that one—Matt’s spot on!].Matt Timmons
“Please put a patch tool in Lightroom that does the same thing that the Spot Removal tool does, but lets us draw our own selection around an area instead of having to use multiple adjacent circles clone/heal an area (i.e a patch tool just like PS, but allows you to change the opacity/location/size like the spot healing tool- maybe add feathering to it too). Often I have to go into Photoshop just for that one thing and I end up with a copied .psd file that can’t be edited in LR. (2) In the Metadata Module, include something that tells you which mode on the camera the picture was taken in (manual, Av, etc.) like in Bridge.”Enrico
“I’d like to see RGB curves in Lightroom 4 both for accurate color correction and color toning in images, or at least the red-cyan slider.”Dick Kenny
“Please add a vote for making Camera Calibration accessible in Library. To many the choices offered by this function are fundamental when deciding what to keep and what to reject. By the time one gets to Develop, its too late – and switching between both modules before you need to is a bore.”Chris Newham
“[Add a] Gradient eraser brush.”William Haun
“Export folders & collections with hierarchy intact. There is a LR/TreeExport plugin available for folders but I’d kill to be able to select a Collection Set and have its contents exported as a folder structure.”Eric
“I would like to have the possebillity to use the lens correction Profiles from CS5 and/or to include new created ones.”Regis
“We would need one think on top of that for video: a way to change the video date after importing! Right now, say you have edited a video, then the date of the modification is used instead of the date of shooting.”Peter [These are so well thought out, I have to imagine this is Peter Krogh, but I could be wrong].
“(1) There is no way to create custom metadata fields without developing a plug-in, and even then, the custom fields only live in the catalog. (2) – Add a shortcut to the straighten tool already, (3) Add an “offline” mode where I can edit image settings/metadata and then batch-apply them when my images are online again (that would be with the export metadata to XMP option active). You know, not the “metadata changed” icons in the library grid. Unlock the develop settings that would be previewed based on the low-res image anyway. (4) Add a “use last” button to the keywords field of the new import dialog box.”Remko
“Also Pano stitching would be very nice to have in Lr itself.”Zack Jones
“Custom File Naming on Import – Allow us to use all meta data for filenaming. For example {YYYYMMDD}_{Camera_Name}_{####} would yield 20100813_7D_0001 for my 7D and 20100813_T2i_0001 for my T2i.”
My thanks to everybody who took the time to comment on Friday. Even if you didn’t wind up as one of my favorites listed here, more importantly your idea may have wound up as one of Adobe’s favorites. :)