Recently the Twitter persona of the Lightroom team asked what plug-ins would we most like to see for Lightroom. Which is fine, but most plug-ins process their magic on raster images. If that was a concern, I hit my go to Lightroom plug-in Photoshop. Another big question that should be considered is “What features does Lightroom need added or refined?” In general, I think Lightroom is near perfect, and is a specialized tool, not a one size fits all solution. That being said, I am going to waste a post and share with everyone some of the features that I would most like to see added to Lightroom.

First off, if you really want something, be sure to send your wish to Adobe via their feature request system. We can all blather on about what we want on message boards, Flickr, Twitter and the litany of blogs that dot the Internet but if you don’t tell Adobe, they will not know why you feel the feature is important. For some of these points, I have submitted feature requests, others, I see where the feature would help me, but in the long run hinder Lightroom’s scope and performance. To submit your feature requests, head over to the Adobe site or click right here.

That being said, here is my wishlist for the next iteration of Lightroom. Hopefully some of these are added and others are pure flights of my fantasy, but still doesn’t change the fact that these features would make Lightroom absolutely perfect for my needs. I write this from my perspectives of being a wedding/portrait photographer, film photographer and preset developer. First I will cover the few that I have sent in feature requests for, leaving my flights of fantasy for last.

Soft Proofing

This is probably one of the most requested features to be added into Lightroom’s realm of capabilities. Without a doubt this single feature would be of the utmost value to professionals world wide utilizing Lightroom for their post processing. To be able to render you image onscreen, preview what final output will look like via printer or lab would be an absolute timesaver for any serious photographer.

By utilizing ICC profiles to render the image on the screen, demonstrating a likely final print appearance, Lightroom would vastly improve any photographer’s work flow. If Lightroom had a hot-key that would apply your preselected ICC profile to your image to preview output quickly from within Lightroom, instead of having to open in Photoshop to soft proof would be great. Even a develop module selection box featuring all available ICC profiles would help.

What would really be killer though, would be the ability to further utilize the Develop Module while Soft Proofing. Instead of just temporarily displaying the proof, actually allowing you to tweak you image with the profile applied so you can perfect your image’s presentation before export. It seems that it would be simple enough with Lightroom’s design as a metadata editor, not an actual pixel editor. However implemented though, anything that eliminates and otherwise unneeded trip to Photoshop is a welcome addition.

Relative Presets

For the preset developer in me, this would be an absolute godsend. If when developing a preset I could set a slider to be adjusted from its current location a set number of units would allow a wider versatility in prets that are developed.

Here is an example. I am currently developing a set of Wratten filters as a preset toolkit. Currently I am running into issues with exposure compensations caused by use of these filters. Many correcting filters will drop exposure 1/3 to 1 full stop in the process of applying their effect. As it is, I have to hard code the Exposure slider to -25 or -50. It would be incredibly helpful to both the accuracy and eas of use of these presets if they could simply adjust the current setting on the image instead of completely rewriting the exposure value.

If you had perfectly processed you image and it required a +1.25 exposure value to get the image there, applying any filter would automatically reset the Exposure slider to the preset’s defined value. If that adjustment applied to -.25 to the current value, it would then it would simply back the exposure off to +1, altering the image in a manner closer to the actual effect of the real filter.

And this would not simply be useful to my emulation presets, but would be of value to any other preset designer that see a need to manipulate Exposure, Recovery, Black or even Contrast. Presets are designed relative to the image they are being developed on. If the presets were relative to the image settings and not simply a predefined script of settings, theoretically the preset would be consistent in its application to all images, making an equivalent alteration to any image from its starting point, completely unrelated to the image that the preset was originally designed for.

As to implementation, I feel it would be as simple as adding a check box and value box to the Save Preset dialog in Lightroom (and ACR for that matter to maintain compatibility). If a value needs to be relative, then simply check the box and set the relative value in therms on + or -. Lightroom could even pull the difference from 0 automatically and then allow the designer to override.

Either way, this would enhance the preset tools Lightroom provides and allow Lightroom users to create even more useful and versatile presets that extend beyond pure image enhancement to honest to goodness tools, ala Photoshop Actions.

Input Scanning Interface

This could be either applied as a part of Lightroom, or as an input plug-in. I don’t care if this is designed by Adobe, LaserSoft Imaging or Hamrick, creator of VueScan. I know that Lightroom is designed as a cataloging tool with RAW processing capabilities, but I shoot a lot of film and Lightroom handles the scans beautifully. 48-bit scans in Lightroom react almost as well as RAW files do, so let us add a utility that allows import from film, scan to 48-bit, output as DNG and automatically import the images into Lightroom.

As more film photographers and those who have switched to digital scan their film stock, many are finding Lightroom capable of handling much of the adjustments required to digitize the images. Lightroom also adds the benefit of the original scan never being manipulated, which is good if they scan once and wish to reinterpret scans.

It is easy enough to scan in VueScan to a set folder as 48-bit Tiff based DNG files, however to be able to do so in Lightroom and have Lightroom automatically import whilst you continue scanning would save me time and effort. As it is, I have to scan my entire folder contents, usually on rolls of film, taking hours. Then I have to import them into mu Lightroom catalog and generate my 1:1 previews. This can take time, if Lightroom automatically grabbed the newest scan, added it to the library and created the preview whilst I scanned the next frame, I would save the 5-15 minutes of import time at the back end. Not to mention that I can start processing images immediately, while scanning continues.

This would be good for me and the rest of the small, but growing, film community.

Relocate Derivative Files

This one is courtesy of my good friend Brandon Oelling from X-Equals. He points out that whenever you Edit in Photoshop…Lightroom generates the derivative PSD of TIFF in the same folder as your original. For many workflows, this can be an issue, as you want to have your processed images in a completely different location from your originals for the sake of clarity and organization. While Brandon provides a good workaround in his post +THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS on X-Equals, it is a time consuming workaround that Adobe could easily eliminate with one, simple change.

When in the Edit In Photoshop… dialog, simple at a File Location option beneath the output image settings. Simply input your folder of choice, and Lightroom creates a raster PSD or TIFF and places it in that folder, creating a new folder in your Lightroom catalog with said image automatically. This would help remove filmstrip crowding and accidentally reworking a process image when you really wanted to manipulate the original RAW image again. Simple fix that would help many photographers out there keep things organized.

As a side to this feature request, it would also be beneficial to stack images from disparate folders. This allows you to keep the original and derivative together, whilst at the same time, not destroying your organizational schema on your hard drive. This should be a separate request, but I mention it here because it seems easy to do and goes hand in hand with relocating derivative files.

For more insight as to why Brandon feels that these are important points for Adobe to address, check out his series on Digital Asset Management.

Now for the pipe dreams

Grain Addition

This is great for me, good for those who want a film look and completely worthless to the rest of the Lightroom community. I really wish Lightroom had a way to add grain to images. Three sliders that represent size, density and coarseness and proceed to clump pixels together to simulate grain. I would like this to generate the final image with grain ala Silver Efex Pro, not as an overlay as typical in Photoshop.

The way I see it functioning would be similar to the way the clone tool works, but creates areas of a solid color with a definite edge to them. By no means easy to implement, but it would allow me even better film emulations by factoring in grain into my presets. This is a very niche request, and the Lightroom team would be half insane to implement it, but I feel the ability to add grain to an image would be spectacular and make Lightroom an even more useful tool to a portion of the target audience.

Obviously, the Grain Simulation would have to be preview at 1:1 zoom. It would be a processor intensive procedure that would take forever to render if it is applied to the whole image during post processing. But you would only want to see the grain at 1:1 anyways, as grain shouldn’t really be so large as to see it in a normal image preview at all. Sure it would add time at export, but it would be well worth the price to avoid having to fake grain in Photoshop or run the image through Silver Efex Pro just to get grain applied after the image is rendered. Rendering grain at time of RAW export would create a more high quality presentation in my opinion.

But again, it is a pipe dream.

Limited Layer Support

This would be useful for many times when layer may be needed to process an image. If Lightroom could support layering of images, such as 4 Virtual Copies of a file, and provide basic Layer Masking support, I could eliminate my need for Photoshop about 50% of the time.

In application I see this as very limited support. Allow me to stack together up to 5 Virtual Copies into a new Virtual Copy. All adjustments to the layers should be done before the layering process, as I believe that in layer mode, Lightroom should not allow for further manipulation of the layers. If you want to manipulate a layer midstream, go back and re-edit the original Virtual Copy that was brought into the layer image.

Now simply allow only masking of layers in layer mode. This would allow multiple exposures to be blended, different presets to be applied to different parts of the image and even double exposures if the layers are from different images. When the file is exported, the Layer Copy would cull data from the Virtual Copies and use that data to generate a fresh Tiff or Jpeg from the combined data. Again, this avoids Photoshop and creates a pristine output file generated only from RAW data, never having to deal with raster images in the interim. A similar process can be carried out in Photoshop via Smart Objects, but it is a rather time consuming work flow, as I detailed on X-Equals recently.

Layering more complicated than this is beyond the scope of Lightroom, and many would argue my proposal is as well. However I see this as a natural extension of Lightroom, and with the limited functionality, should not create a lot of added overhead while providing a way to create images while in RAW without manipulating pixels.

Again, a pipe dream.

Lens Perspective Correction

PTLens is an awesome plug-in for Lightroom, but why can Lightroom not have some of the basic features on its own? I would think that basic keystoning could be done in Lightroom fairly easily. Since Lightroom is based solely on the editing and interpretation of metadata, would it be so difficult to institute basic image correction for lens distortion?

Case in point, doing a large group portrait with a wide angle or even fish-eye lens. As it is you could retouch the image in Lightroom and then have to rely on PTLens or Photoshop to correct distortion for you before you crop. If image distortion correction was provided in Lightroom, you could simple correct the distortion, crop the image and then export the image as you desire. Again this provides the benefit of you image being produced solely from RAW data and not requiring further manipulation of pixels on the final rendered, raster image.

Although this seems simple enough to me, there may be issues under the hood I am not considering. So for now, I am going to again chalk this up as a pipe dream.

So What Can You Do?

So we can sit here and whine about what we desire all we want, but if your desires are not made know directly to Adobe, then you are simply preaching to the choir. If you see something on this list you think is needed in future revision of Lightroom, or if you have an idea that would really take Lightroom up a notch, let the Lightroom team know through Adobe’s Feature Request/Bug Report Form on Adobe.com. Surely they are already working on some of these ideas, but it never hurts for them to know that you, their customer, desire these features.

There is no sense in cluttering up Lightroom with features that have little or no demand, which is why I keep my pipe dream requests to myself for the time being. What makes Lightroom special in comparison to Photoshop, is that it is a limited, scope precision tool, like a scalpel. Photoshop on the other hand, is a massive application that does almost everything and then some. A behemoth of a program to master, and is not as streamlined as Lightroom.

We need Lightroom to stay trim, if it grows too big it will slow more and become another piece of bloated-code. However, new features are needed to enhance an already great product. Lightroom has an edge on Aperture at the moment, and it has to continue to evolve to stay ahead, otherwise photographers will start to drift away to Aperture, much like many Aperture users are starting to currently drift to Lightroom.

The Lightroom team has to balance new features with performance, and can only devote so much time and money on developing new features. Your feedback helps them gauge what people are clamoring for and what people really need. This helps them stay focused and provide a better product on a timely basis.

Just food for thought …

Michael

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