I thought it might be fun to throw my personal wish list for features to be seen in the next version.
For all I know, Adobe may be working on everything on this list and much, much more. On the other hand, I have no idea whether any of these are practical. But for what it’s worth, the following are things I’d love to see in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0. These are just my personal wishlist, based on no “inside information” whatsoever.
1. Have a true regional adjustment mask…even if simple lasso with an interactive feathering slider.
2. Be able to make a PDF book from journal entries and a collection that could be submitted to any of the one-off publishing houses (or any other publishing house, for that matter). Perhaps this could be a new module called Portfolio. It would be nice to have an option to print this book on your own printer so that it could be presented as a traditional portfolio, too.
3. Web journal entries…that could also be played with a slide show. These would allow one to attach any kind of notes…even reminders about what to wear next time you go there…without having them attached to your pictures when you send them. Aperture already has this feature.
4. Get a LightZone plug in or have some other way to expand/contract specific grayscale tonalities. It’s too slow to have to export to another application.
5. Get serious about encouraging third parties to make useful Lightroom plug-ins. I’ve yet to see any.
6, Fix having to lower brightness when you jump to Photoshop and back…and why haven’t I seen more complaints about that? Is it just my computer?
7. Provide ASMP standard keywords and metadata within the application, so that the world would have a starting point.
8. I’d like to see the pre-set previews in the workspace, rather than the Preview window, though I realize that the Preview Window can be enlarged. Of course, you can do that now, to some degree, by simply clicking on the pre-set and then hitting Cmd/Ctrl + Z if you don’t want to keep what you see.
9. I’d like to see a pre-set be “mixable” with the current settings and the be able to save that result as a pre-set, too.
10. How about automatic sky darkening? I suppose one could do that as a pre-set, actually.
Now I’d love to hear your ideas…not that I’m the one to talk to. You should tell Adobe, too.
Support for Unicode UTF-16 so that accented characters can be imported and exported, or at the very least UTF-8. Presently accented keywords lose their attributes upon export and I have yet to be able to import either a UTF-8 or UTF-15 encoded list of keywords. (It could be me, so apologies if I'm doing something wrong, but I don't think so).
Oh, I forgot, an easy and straightforward email function, as every freeware offers...
And calculation of file size in export menu, instead of guessing...
Most important : release the SDK to get third party plugins. This will bring Lightroom to stratospheric levels.
Centralized keyword editing and managing into one single floating palette, as current functions are spread all over the place.
Local / selective adjustments.
Full PDF support and workflow.
I'd love to see:
- crop/straightening tool that allows you to be zoomed in (sometimes helpful for drawing with the measure tool on straight lines that you can only see when zoomed)
- perspective/transform/scale tool
- modules for uploading to photosharing sites (flickr/smugmug as well as the "pro" ones)
- the "stack with original" feature to work properly when doing external edits ; at present this puts the 2 pics side by side, with no clue as to which is the edited version, and doesn't actually stack them (at least, not for me). I'd like it to show me which one is the edit (like Aperture does, with a badge), and to stack them.
In addition to the pdf books you mentioned I would like to see Photomerge and HDR from photoshop without having to do a round trip to photoshop.
Adding to the Wish list for future LR versions.
The ability to geo code photos directly from a hand held gps and add GPS coordinates to the exif data such as RoboGeo does now.
The Lightroom plug-in (module?) I long for the most these days is a panorama stitcher.
Your list is very good, but all I want in addition is dual/multiple-screen support (and not just by dragging the window-sizer across both screens).
Aperture has it, Adobe supports it in all their other apps that I can think of, why not Lightroom? I understand their apparent want to have Lightroom be contained in a single window, but I always feel like I'm wasting time and free desktop space currently.