Mark Hamburg Interview: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Part 1 of 2 · 1855 words posted 01/23/2007 03:35 PM
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, currently in beta, is Adobe’s newest tool for importing, managing, developing, and printing digital images. On January 19 I spoke with Mark Hamburg, Adobe Fellow, former Photoshop architect, and founder of the Lightroom project. Mark has been working on digital imaging at Adobe Systems Incorporated since 1990 and is currently driving the development of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.
since1968: You started work on Lightroom partly based on your frustration at working with several gigs of images—but the project has had almost a five year gestation.
Mark Hamburg: Well, Lightroom as a multi-image editor probably hasn’t been going for five years. I left the Photoshop team in spring of 2002, so I’ve been looking at post-PS stuff for about five years. The general direction and focus on how you deal with lots and lots of images in photography workflow grew probably a year plus after that.
I started out worrying about alternative paradigms for image editing, but then my manager at the time, Greg Gilley, who was an avid photographer, started to push toward: “Well, we just have all this stuff, and how do we deal with lots of images and what can we get out of pushing ACR further.” Actually the way he got me to deal with that was he pushed me to go get a camera and start shooting more. I very rapidly determined that as interesting as it was to do image editing there was clearly just a general problem that comes from shooting far more than the tools are really built to deal with. At this stage it’s focused on “I’m shooting gigs of images and I need a tool to deal with that.”
The volume problem really hit home in fall of 2003 when I did my first shoot of nearly 500 images in one day. The things we’d been experimenting with like light table simulations just fell apart in the face of that sort of volume.
Even after that, we kept resisting getting into hard core image management for quite a while because it would pretty obviously eat up everything else we wanted to do and we felt that Adobe had already explored image management with Photoshop Album. We capitulated eventually and it did indeed consume vast amounts of attention and resources and probably could have taken even more if they’d been available.
So that’s my partial defense for why it’s taken so long.
since1968: Is it fair to say that but for Aperture, Lightroom might never have been released? In the podcast it sounded as if LR might not see the light of day. Is that a fair assessment?
MH: Certainly there were a lot of doubts. Adobe has been very successful with Photoshop. From Adobe’s perspective and market surveys every photographer out there has Photoshop. Working through that mindset, it’s sort of a classic thing that happens when you have a product that’s strongly successful: seeing the things that are different from the product is difficult for people whose job it is to spend most of their time thinking about Photoshop. And so we would go through discussions internally about “Well how many people are there like this? How big is this market? Maybe what we want to do is just add something on to Photoshop.” A variety of things like that.
And as we’ve seen in the public beta program, this isn’t just an internal issue. Photographers generally get the program and understand the problems it is trying to solve. People more focused on Photoshop, however, have a harder time seeing where Lightroom fits in.
The benefit for us of Aperture is that it clarified the market for people who had doubts that you could actually launch a product into that space. It certainly raised the pressure to ship Lightroom. As long as there were people with doubts about the existence of the market we could spend lots of time internally just trying to clarify what the market was and how big it was. Aperture’s entry showed that there is a market and we should be pursuing it. It’s pretty obvious that it does match up almost identically with the market we had identified though Apple’s approach to that market is also pretty different from ours when you drop down from the high-level overview.
since1968: One of my favorite Lightroom features is the way the Print module options are integrated directly into panels, instead of opening a new dialog box. Who thought of that?
MH: The notion about doing more without going into external dialogs goes back to an idea that was introduced early on in the project—before we were working with lots of images—taking ideas that had started to evolve in Photoshop with things like Liquify and “Save for Web”: a number of these things were getting to be mini-applications in a dialog. We had these giant plug-ins (we refer to them as “mondo plug-ins”) and the notion got to be “What if you could build an application where everything was essentially these modules that sat on top of the core, and instead of going into a monster dialog and going back—what if you just went from one environment to the next and never went back to a core?”
So the diagram that I would draw for this: Photoshop with a big circle in the middle, and you go out to various things; you go out and come back, you go out and come back. The model for Lightroom was to say “We still have a core but the user never actually goes into it. The user just goes and bounces around the things that are on the outside of the circle.”
So the Print module then becomes a full peer to all of the other tasks. The idea is to take what you would put into an elaborate print dialog and instead bring it up as a user interface for the print environment. And what actually happens inside that environment is the result of lots and lots of iterations. As I joke, the print environment works as well as it does in Lightroom because we made Kevin Tieskoetter iterate on it until his eyes bled.
since1968: In one of your recent podcasts, Phil Clevenger says he demos Lightroom from the “inside out,” with most of the interface hidden. It took me a long time to discover just how image-centric Lightroom’s interface can be. Why not install Lightroom with its panels hidden? Most programs I explore by adding pieces to the interface, but with Lightroom I explore by taking pieces away.
MH: Ideally we would ship it in the ideal configuration to work in; of course that will vary from person to person. If you have all the panels open, unless you’re on a really large screen and it’s far off to the sides—mostly in your peripheral vision—it gets to be a lot of stuff and that’s not ideal.
The notion was to have an interface where we could make things go away. The problem is from the standpoint of users discovering things: if we were to ship it with the panels hidden off to the side users would have to learn “Oh, if I move over and I click this thing on the side and then I pop this panel open it has a bunch of settings that I want.” It seems easier to have them see the settings and then have them learn that they can make things go away and can adapt this in a way that’s ideal for whatever my workflow is. Certainly it does have the downside that it means that the initial launch experience is not reflective of how good the app can be if you allow the interface to get out of the way.
There are people who will run with the top module picker bar hidden. If you ran with that hidden—if that’s how we came up initially—people would have a hard time knowing “oh I can go to these other modules.” They could discover it in the menus but the menus have lots of stuff in them and you have to find and dig through and find stuff.
I think we’re also seeing that web pages have been to some extent undermining the value of the menu bar. People see more things in browsers; the menu bar in the browser is pretty much completely useless in terms of what it contains. People don’t go looking in the menu bar by default as much.
since1968: I’m one of those people who run with the module picker hidden.
MH: Yeah. That’s just it. Ideally Lightroom is designed to run in full screen mode with the menu bar hidden. That was one of our focuses throughout the evolution of the product. Heavy Photoshop users frequently ran in full screen mode and we wanted to build a UI that was really optimized for full screen. At the same time it would be considered pretty rude if when we first launched Lightroom the first thing it does is blanks out everything else on your screen.
since1968: I understand that you want to differentiate Lightroom from Photoshop and the older version of Camera RAW, but sometimes I’ve found the language changes confusing. “Smooth” seems to work like Camera RAW’s “Luminance Smoothing.”
MH: Yes, it does. The noise reduction is same as Camera RAW’s; we’ve had a few terminology differences but those are now getting sorted out with the next version of Camera RAW. The issue for Lightroom was because of the user interface design we tend to favor shorter labels.
If you look at Camera RAW, it stacks the name on top of the slider and so has a fair amount of horizontal space. Because we were trying to make more of the controls available at once, stacking them up vertically, we ended up putting the label off the the left-hand side of the slider. That then means you don’t want to spend a lot of space on the label. So there was a certain amount of “well can we pick a shorter name than this?”
since1968: But at some point Adobe will map the names for various functions and algorithms across its various image management tools? If I perform an action in Camera RAW will it render the same result as Lightroom?
MH: Yes, there will eventually be a version of Camera RAW which will be synched up with Lightroom because we’re building off identical code. This also means all of those cool new development features in Lightroom are making their way into Camera RAW. Not all of the UI functionality is coming over, but all of the processing is showing up in Camera RAW.
since1968: The Sydney Morning Herald has reported that Lightroom will be released on February 28.
MH: That would not be accurate, nor is CNet’s report of January 29 accurate as a release date. The release date is not announced at this time.
since1968: And we shouldn’t expect any more beta point releases?
MH: That is correct. There will not be a beta 5, nor beta 4.2
In Part 2 of the interview to be posted later this week, Mark discusses Lua’s place in Lightroom.
* * *
2. On Jan 24, 04:28 PM dasmb said:
I am an Aperture user. I like it a lot, thought it is still a young, first of its kind project that gives me trouble sometimes. I’ve never had much devotion for Photoshop—I’ve always felt that it was far too much a “try it and see” tool. But Lightroom sounds more…right. Like it builds on the strengths of Photoshop but awknowledges its interface flaws. This pleases me, because even if I don’t opt for Lightroom it’s already pushing Aperture to become a better product (and one expects vica versa).
#3. On Jan 24, 10:10 PM Andrew Hedges said:
Any guesses as to how much it will cost when it’s out of beta? I kinda like the beta = free thing! :^)
#4. On Jan 25, 11:58 PM Gary Wagner said:
I have been using the beta and like it a lot except that it moves so slow when a lot of images are loaded. Will this issue be resolved in the final version?
#5. On Jan 27, 04:12 PM Thomas Herter said:
Lightroom is not only about Aperturte, it is also about RawShooter. Adobe took over a thriving and popular raw converter from Pixmantec,
and shut it down abruptly approx. 7 months before delivering own software.
We are stranded with raw files from newer cameras. For me alone, its the fate of tens of thousands of *.rws correction files documenting my hard work.
I fill strongly about objecting to the “pink colored” rejoices about this product. I would like to comment how it really performs in my eyes: Slow and unreliable. I for once cannot get the job done with it. Not only because of the “Not responding” process state and forced WinXP reboots! We must have place for critial voices as well.
Instantly after Adobe/Pixmantec deal Bibble Labs made an announcement that they will read *rws files, but later they reworded this anouncement and in fact, they read the files indeed, but they ignore some of the values stored in *rws files. Officially because they cannot map the settings and curves on Bibbles values… I am too experienced in this business to believe that.
Adobe never made a delivery for the *.rws RawShooter files, period.
#6. On Jan 29, 09:39 AM Ellis Vener said:
it’s January 29 and Lightroom 1.0 is indeed released according to http://www.photoshopnews.com
$299.00 is the official list price but pre-ship order price is $199.00. No word on educational pricing or if there will be any educational channel pricing.
Thomas: Can’t help you with your WindowsXP problems , not out to bash Ms, or convert WinXP users but it has been nothing but stable on a iMac ( running on a 2.16Ghz Core Duo 2 w/ 2Gb RAM, running under OS X10.4.8). I have my suspicions that Adobe has been targeting the coding of the PC version of Lightroom for Vista since Beta 4 however.
I too saw Lightroom beta 5 backi nDecember at the Epson Print Academy and some featureswere talked about. Also in the LighAdobe lightroom podcasts on iTunesvariousAdob people have been talkign about features that wouldn’t make the LR 1.0 cut and may be included in LR 2.0
I agree with the need for critical voices. Teh stability problems I have been having are with the PsCs3 beta. Everytime I try to open the Histogram window it crashes.
#
1. On Jan 24, 02:17 PM Winsor said:
I just saw an Adobe guy at an Epson seminar demonstrate beta 5. He said the goal was to not release it, but to release v.1 in March. He said that if there were difficulties meeting that goal then we would get beta 5. He then apologized for 3 stalls in the demonstration and said that they were working hard on performance.
#