Photoshop Lightroom A Mature And Successful App

It’s a great time to be a photographer—first Aperture, now Photoshop Lightroom. Aperture has the advantage of being out for more than a year; has Lightroom’s public beta period made up for it?

I have been working with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 for a couple months now—importing my photo library, developing photos with the Develop module and making some prints and web galleries. If you haven’t heard of Lightroom yet, then I’m not sure which cave you’ve been hiding in: Adobe has done a spectacular job exposing Lightroom to the world with its year-long public beta period and grouping it with Photoshop as part of the “Photoshop family”. NAPP and KW Media Group (Scott Kelby’s business outfit) have also pushed Lightroom heavily, making it a big part of the recent Photoshop World (entire tracks were devoted to Lightroom) as well as introducing the Photoshop World crowd to new products such as the new Darkroom magazine and Adobe Press’s Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book, The: The Complete Guide for Photographers. Lightroom probably has more early exposure for it than any other Adobe application, and definitely more than Apple gave Aperture—interestingly enough, I don’t see Aperture being promoted by anyone other than Apple, and they were conspicuously absent at Photoshop World.

All publicity aside, how does Lightroom stack up? Even though it’s a 1.0 release, is it mature enough to be useful in professional workflows? I think the answer is yes.

CHANGING INTERFACE FUNDAMENTALS

Figure 1: The Lightroom interface.

Lightroom’s interface (see Figure 1) is unlike any other in Adobe’s stable of creative professional software:

• The dominant color is dark gray and black (I am curious if Aperture’s interface influenced its design, but I do know that Lightroom existed before Aperture hit the market so it’s unclear).
• Many of the keyboard commands do not require modifier keys (E alone brings images into Loupe View; G alone returns users to Grid View).
• Users are granted an unparalleled control of the interface, allowing modification of everything from the background colors and identity plate to the flourishes at the end of the panels. The identity plate is a particularly striking example of this because the Lightroom branding and typography can be taken right off the product and replaced with the user’s own logo and typography!
• Even though Lightroom shares tools and functions with Photoshop and Camera Raw, they look very different—Lightroom’s slick, dark panels are a stark contrast with Camera Raw’s light gray dialog boxes, which look slightly dated next to Lightroom.

Figure 2: The Identity Plate feature allows you to “brand” your Lightroom space.

It should be noted that identity plates (see Figure 2) can be either text or graphics—if you have a logo, you can use it; if you don’t, you can still leverage your company name.

Adobe has always set the standards for application interface design for creative professional software—but is Lightroom a step backward or forward? I think it’s a step forward in its ease of use (I absolutely love using keyboard shortcuts without using modifier keys all the time) and especially in its allowing users to customize the interface itself. Ever since I first started working with computers, I and others have worked on making our machines our own—creating and inserting our own icons, making desktop patterns, tweaking screen savers and sometimes making our own alert sounds. Apple allowed the Macintosh to be customized; Windows followed suit. Now we have Lightroom, and Adobe found a consumer base (the pro photography market) that had a strategic business reason for wanting control over interface design: to present photography with their studio’s brand integrated with the application presenting the photography. So we have the identity plate—I’m not sure I like the name “identity plate,” but being able to put my logo on my photography presentation software is very cool. This can also be used in the Slideshow, Print and Web modules to add your brand to your slide shows, printed pages and web galleries. Adobe definitely listened to their beta photographer users when they thought this one up.

The panels work quite well, and this is where I see influence from the Adobe CS3 palette behaviors. Panels can be hidden and revealed when the mouse is brought close to the panel area. Like palettes docked together, panels can be collapsed to make room for panels below it. The triangles on the panel headers will collapse and expand the panels, and these act the same as the Mac OS X triangles next to folder names in List and Column View. I like the panels—they work well together and tools are easy to find—but I think they take up too much space in the interface. Adobe palettes have always been a great size—not too small but not too large—but these panels are extra large even when they’re shrunk down as far as they can go. Adobe Bridge allows more freedom in shrinking sidebars way down, but despite its customization features Lightroom is quite rigid.

Ironically, what I like about the interface—its differences with Adobe’s other interfaces—is what I don’t like about the interface. Lightroom is like the big kid in your grade school class that was several inches taller than everyone else: it sticks out too much. None of the buttons and icons look the same as those on other Adobe apps. The text used on the panel headers is different. Panels can act fundamentally different from palettes in Adobe’s other applications—Auto Hide & Show, for instance, might throw you off if you don’t know you can right-click on a side panel’s triangle arrow to control how the panel responds to mouseovers. This is a very minor quibble and anyone who uses Lightroom enough will eventually find its subtleties second nature and sometimes wonder why Adobe didn’t think of this sooner! Everything is new with Lightroom’s interface, and innovation is great most of the time but the new interface requires some hands-on experience to get the most out of it—especially if you are a long-time user of Adobe’s products. Once you get used to it, you’ll enjoy it as much as I do.