Adobe Lightroom

Adobe has made a major break with tradition and thrown the dice with the release of the "Public Beta" of Lightroom. It's an interesting strategy, and one that may pay off in new tools that help the digital photographer develop a more organic workflow.

What is Lightroom?

Lightroom is a new "lightweight" application built specifically for digital photographers and the unique challenges they face. There are three main components to the program that are currently in different stages of development. These include the Browsing User Interface (UI), the RAW file processor, and an asset management component.

Another important characteristic of Lightroom is the way it's being released, rather than simply what is being released. Lightroom is being released as a Public Beta, which means that it is being sent out for testing by the world in an unfinished state.

What's up with "Public Beta"?

The concept of a Public Beta is an interesting one. Beta software is typically software that is pretty near finished, and that is released to a group of testers who beat on it, looking for bugs and other problems.

Instead of putting the finishing touches on the software before releasing it, the Public Beta strategy lets users get a look at the software - and provide feedback to the engineers - before all features are finalized. Many of us who have tested software before, and who have used Lightroom, would say that this is closer to a public Alpha than a Beta. Alpha software is not feature-complete, and Lightroom is nowhere near feature-complete.

From a practical standpoint, the unfinished state of Lightroom has several implications.

If you are interested in playing with Lightroom at this stage, I suggest that you work with the software for a while on duplicate files that are not part of your real workflow. Lots of things could change, and you may find that work you do at the start of the process is not compatible with the software sometime down the line. (See RAW file processor below). If you are going to try it out, pay attention to release notes and online discussions before you do critical work to real files.

If you want to be part of the process - and I find software testing to be an rewarding endeavor - be aware that you are testing, and that things may not go smoothly. If you are not suited to this temperamentally, or don't have free time to spend on this, you may want to wait for it to be finished, or just more finished - before you give it a try.

How will it integrate with Photoshop?

This is one of many parts of Lightroom that has not been wired up yet. While you can send RAW files to Photoshop (as you can do with Aperture, for instance) you cannot see your RAW file adjustments in the RAW files themselves in Bridge. You will have to export RAW files to Photoshop as TIFFs in order to open in Photoshop, or to get Bridge to see the changes you have made.

Eventually, I hope that Lightroom will be fully integrated with Photoshop and Bridge. I'd like to see Lightroom be a kind of a "front-end" for Bridge. All this, however, has yet to be decided. Part of the decision will rest of what the message is that comes from the "testers", that is, you folks who give Lightroom a spin.

The Browsing User Interface (UI)

The most obvious new feature - and the one that is probably closest to finished - is the Browsing UI. I'm referring here to the way Lightroom lets you browse through images, using the Loupe, the Compare feature, and the bin. Because Lightroom was built to be a tool for digital photographers, it has a streamlined UI that will enable the rapid browsing of many image files quickly. This will enable efficient rating of images for quality, and for quick adjustment of RAW file settings.

Lightroom was built from the ground up to deal with a lot of image files, and it offers speedy editing functionality without requiring the fastest computer. Unlike Bridge, which has its constituency divided among the several Adobe applications and the many kinds of Creative Suie users, the Lightroom team was free to develop a tool optimized for digital photography.

Check out some of the movies made available through Adobe to see this whiz-bang interface. I think you'll like it.

The RAW file processor

In order to understand what's going on in Lightroom, why it's special, and how it may or may not integrate with Photoshop and Bridge, we need to do a little review of RAW file functionality. Once you understand the nature of instruction-set-based adjustments, you will be well on your way to seeing what's happening here.

Third-party RAW file processors (like Adobe Camera Raw, C1, Bibble, Raw Shooter Premium, and Aperture, to name a few) generally do not actually change a RAW file when they make an adjustment to the file. In general, they store the adjustment of the RAW file as an instruction-set. That is, they store a little bit of text that says to make the picture lighter, or to change the color, or whatever change you have specified. When the file is put away, the RAW file data remains unchanged, and the instruction-set is stored with the file so that next time the file is viewed or opened, the changes can be applied. Usually these changes are stored as sidecar files or in a central database.

In general, there is no updating of the embedded preview inside the file (except when adjustments are made with manufacturer's software). The only way to see what you have done to the image file - like changing to Black and White, or correcting color balance - is to open the file with the RAW file converter that made the changes and have the file rendered again.

Every RAW file converter uses a different formula under the hood to process the raw data. So Adobe Camera Raw and Aperture will render the same file slightly differently, depending on the capabilities of the application, and choices that are made by the person who wrote the software. While this makes things confusing for the photographer at first, it really is a benefit. Programmers can develop different and better ways to decode and adjust RAW files, so that a photographer has a choice for how a file is converted.

Likewise, the way the instructions are stored - the syntax of the instructions - is particular to every RAW file converter. Adobe Camera Raw uses the syntax <crs:Brightness>76</crs:Brightness> to indicate a setting of the Brightness slider of 76. This setting would not be picked up by any other RAW file converter, because the controls used, and the syntax used for storing the settings is different between applications.

Although the initial core functionality of Lightroom was Adobe Camera Raw, the Lightroom team has developed a number of new tools for RAW file rendering. I think that you will find that these tools allow some interesting correction options that do not exist in Camera Raw. This is a place where Lightroom may offer some dramatic improvements over the existing functionality in CS2, but it comes at a price.

At this point, Lightroom cannot see any of the RAW file adjustments that you did in Camera Raw, and Bridge and Camera Raw cannot see any of the adjustments that you make in Lightroom. I expect this to change before too long, but at the moment, this is a real impediment to incorporation of Lightroom into a mature CS2 workflow.

There are several ways Adobe could remedy this mismatch, ranging from a "CS2-safe" mode, to a Plug-in for Bridge that would understand Lightroom conversions. There could also be some kind of translation utility that takes Lightroom syntax and translates it, as best as possible, to Camera Raw syntax.

I would keep an eye out for compatibility enhancements. Once the approach to fixing this mismatch is implemented, it should be safe to start working on image files with Lightroom in a production environment

The Asset Manager

The Asset Management part of Lightroom - the ability to use Lightroom to track and manage your image files over the long term, is another part of the applications that will undergo significant changes over the coming months. It has only started to be implemented, and I would say that it is less certain to ever be part of my own production workflow.

Unlike a RAW file converter - where you can use several programs concurrently - the choice of asset management software is a major long-term commitment. John Beardsworth likes to say that your relationship with asset management software is like serial monogamy: you are married to it, at least for the moment. And when you split up, it is likely to be a kind of messy affair.

Alpha/Beta testing asset management software is a sticky business. You will need to put a good bit of investment into the software to see if it works, and it's possible that all the organizing work you do will be very hard to extract in the end.

If you find that you like the way Lightroom converts RAW files, and that you like the way you can browse images with it, then you should keep an eye out for its capabilities as an Asset Manager. It's got a long way to go still, but it may get there.

In Conclusion

Adobe has made its reputation among photographers for the indispensable ubiquity of Photoshop. It is THE tool of choice for photographers who want to craft final images that bring to life their imaginations. It's used all over the world on an unimaginable number of system configurations. Adobe does a very good job of making it rock-solid on al of those systems, without needing an endless series of patches.

All this stability and market share come at a price, however. It has made the development process of the software slow, as every part of this incredibly complex application is tested and made to integrate.

The spread of digital photography has brought a different set of imperatives to the development of imaging software. Challenges that were faced by few people three years ago are now commonplace. The central issue is no longer, "how do I make an image look the way I want it to", but rather, "how do I deal with all these ^%#*& files?".

The solution to fast-changing problems is likely to be found by nimble software development teams, with new approaches. To Adobe's credit, that's just what they have done with the Lightroom project. They cut the team loose, letting them start all over from the beginning to see what they could come up with.

The Public Beta is one more step in that reinvention process. It could turn out to be a real boon to the development, offering the engineers invaluable information on the direction for the new product. It could also turn out the be a cacophonous mess, a chorus of incoherent voices urging the team to go in every direction. Only time will tell.

In the meantime, if you want to play a little part in imaging history, download the public beta, and give it a whirl.