On the personality of Lightroom

Over in the Lightroom Journal, software architect Mark Hamburg shares his thoughts on power vs. complexity & other aspects of the personality of Lightroom.  I find his thoughts refreshingly candid:

We wanted Lightroom to seem elegant. To exhibit grace. To show an attention to style beyond the utilitarian aspect that dominated Adobe’s products up to that time. We wanted a richer UI experience.

We’ve been successful in many ways. At the same time, we are painfully aware that there are places where we could be yet more graceful or elegant.

If you’re interested in more, see also Mark’s interview on since1968.com, or listen to the podcast in
which he & other members of the Lightroom team tackle these issues. As for the personas of Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash, see previous.

0 thoughts on “On the personality of Lightroom

  1. I have to admit, LightRoom is the most graceful and elegant 1.0 app I ever had the pleasure to use. It totally revolutionized the way I handle my pictures and appeared at the perfect time on the market.

  2. I have Aperture, but it’s too slow on my hardware, and about 5% of my photos — generally, my most important 5% — exhibit nasty clipped blacks thanks to the Aperture raw converter, so I’ve been using Lightroom instead. Mostly what I like about Lightroom is that it is Camera Raw. Not too keen on the GUI. Not a fan of the clunky “modes” idea and having to switch them all them all the time, and I think the look of the GUI is overdone. Too much “chrome,” you might say.
    I think Aperture’s got a superior GUI in that it allows you to do anything at any time without having to switch modes, but when I’m tweaking an image — and that’s the main point, after all — Lightroom works better for me.
    That being said, if Adobe starts requiring that Lightroom users “authorize” the software à là CS3, I’m out of there for good.
    I simply will not use software that treats me like a pirate.

  3. I agree that the interface in Aperture is better. I don’t like the “modes” much compared to Aperture. I predicted about a year ago that Lightroom had no chance of catching Aperture. But I was wrong.
    What won me over was Lightroom’s handling of metadata with Bridge/Photoshop, as well as ACR. Aperture does a good job, but it’s light years behind Lightroom for control over image quality. And that’s a deal-breaker for Aperture.

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