Mark Hamburg Interview: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Part 2 of 2 · 1691 words posted 02/15/2007 08:57 PM

Last month I spoke to Mark Hamburg, Adobe Fellow, former Photoshop architect, and founder of the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom project. In the first half of our interview we discussed Lightroom’s lengthy gestation and innovative UI. Here’s the second part of our talk.

since1968: Lightroom’s first beta was Mac only. Thanks for the Mac love—but why did you choose Mac first?

Mark Hamburg: I’m primarily a Mac user, and as it happens a lot of people on the initial team were primarily Mac people. We’ve now got some hardcore Windows users on the team for balance. We started out doing what was much more a research project, though, and it seemed sensible to only focus on doing one platform first.

We actually spent a while at one point starting to get things running cross-platform and that managed to sidetrack most of the project. The lesson there was that when you are still figuring out what to build, you don’t want to let yourself be distracted with coming up with cross-platform architectures too early. You want to keep cross-platform in the back of your mind, but the most wonderful cross-platform strategy without a product to build on it doesn’t really get one anywhere.

Another thing that influenced us in this regard is that Photoshop started its current code base in the early 90s. Though it has evolved over time there are certain assumptions built in very deeply that reflect the state of the art at that time and the Photoshop team is having to do a lot of work to move beyond them. When we started what would become the Lightroom project we wanted to focus on building for “modern” operating systems. Mac OS X by that point had been out for a while and was more or less settled. On the other hand Microsoft was busy still just talking about Longhorn, so Mac OS X was in a better position for us to start on when looking for a modern OS.

The irony here is that Lightroom 1.0 ended up being built for XP rather than Vista, and we’ve already felt some development pain from that.

Finally, we knew that in reaching photographers it was really important to get to the influencer market and that market was largely a Mac market. If you go through and look at how the market breaks down among photographers, the influencers tend to be heavily Mac—not entirely, but heavily. The mainstream working photographers frequently are on Windows. In the “prosumer” market Windows still dominates but there’s a mixture. Knowing that we wanted to start with the influencers, we needed to be on the platform they were going to be on.

since1968: Lightroom is 40% Lua. How did you select Lua? Which parts of the program are handled by Lua?

MH: I foisted Lua on the rest of the team which actually at that point was very small. But I had discovered it just in reading some of the mailing lists I was on—I think it was actually a garbage collection mailing list that led me to it.

I wanted to build an app that was heavily scriptable and was looking for a good scripting language to build in and got the pointer to Lua. I’d actually read one of the first papers on Lua several years earlier but hadn’t pursued it because it hadn’t been relevant to what I was doing. At that point Lua was also much more primitive than it was when we picked it up.

Lua has an appealing balance of simplicity and power. It’s small, fast, and easy to embed. It also has a very straightforward license associated with it. It’s very much like Scheme language I like—but without a syntax likely to make people go running for the hills. So there were a lot of things.

I looked at some other things. I looked at JavaScript: Adobe had an internal implementation of JavaScript but it wasn’t as easy to do drop-ins and all the things we wanted to do in the Lightroom project. I looked at Python, I looked at Ruby. Some things were going to be bigger, slower, and had licenses that were harder to figure out. Lua just happened to fit really well.

So what we do with Lua is essentially all of the application logic from running the UI to managing what we actually do in the database. Pretty much every piece of code in the app that could be described as making decisions or implementing features is in Lua until you get down to the raw processing, which is in C++. The database engine is in C; the interface to the OS is in C++ and Objective C as appropriate to platform. But most of the actually interesting material in the app beyond the core database code (which is SQLite) and the raw processing code (which is essentially Adobe Camera Raw) is all in Lua.

since1968: What development environment do you use to write Lua? LuaEclipse?

MH: We have our own development environment. On the Mac side we have a fairly sophisticated IDE that was developed internally as one engineer’s first project when he started on the team. We have a Windows IDE as well. It isn’t as sophisticated as the Mac IDE. I think the people who are doing their primary development on Windows are generally either using the Windows IDE or they’re editing the source code in Visual Studio.

since1968: Whoa—Adobe is known for building or acquiring some famous IDEs: HomeSite, Flex Builder, Dreamweaver. Did you look at your stable before building your own? Any change the Mac IDE will evolve into a future public project?

MH: Tim Gogolin, the engineer who built the IDE, gave a demo at the Lua Workshop in 2005 and had lots of people drooling. We’ve contemplated on occasion whether there was a good way to release it to the public, but it’s pretty tightly coupled to the rest of the Lightroom implementation. It will, however, definitely be included when we do a serious SDK for Lightroom.

since1968: Lua’s not such a common scripting language. Apart from a legion of World of Warcraft modders, do you have to grow your own Lua talent?

MH: Yes, we have to teach people Lua. The benefit is that it’s fairly easy to learn. One of the people who joined the team was an avid scripter anyway, but his comment coming in was that Lua was easier to learn than JavaScript.

since1968: On the Mac, did you use LuaObjCBridge or write your own bridge to Cocoa?

MH: We wrote our own bridge.

since1968: Let’s talk about extensibility. Adobe will release an SDK sometime after 1.0. Data from C is directly accessible in Lua’s userdata type, so presumably Adobe could really open up Lightroom to be extended as far as a developer can take it. Will developers be able to write extensions in Lua?

MH: [Laughing] Developers will have to write their extensions in Lua. At one point—and it probably complicates the app a little—there was probably some notion that we’d provide ways to let people write things in purely native code as well. But I think at this point you will have to write at least part of your logic in Lua for knitting into the rest of the system.

When people ask “What do I do for Lightroom development?” I tell them “Go out and learn Lua. Hack World of Warcraft until we’ve released an SDK.”

Any APIs we publish we’d like to commit to supporting long term. In getting a 1.0 out as we’re sorting through some of the feature set there’s a fair amount of churn on the APIs that we have. Putting out an SDK means we need to start freezing those a lot more, so that’s essentially the delaying factor. After version 1 we get to go through and sort through and say “Yes we can commit to this. We can publish it and put it in the SDK.”

since1968: What’s the coolest Lightroom feature that people haven’t noticed or hasn’t been mentioned in the blogs?

MH: One of the things people haven’t entirely gotten is some of Phil Clevenger’s working from the “inside out” behavior. It takes time to really grasp how to tune your workspace, but once you do, you can get a lot of stuff out of the way.

One of the really surprising features for me in Lightroom came out of the Print module. It starts with doing the basic grid work, but combining extreme grids with the “zoom to fill” options start to push you toward discovering new way of looking at your images and new layouts that wouldn’t have been expected on our part. The grid goes in as “OK we’re dealing with contact sheets and so forth” but what comes out of it is that it actually becomes a viable creative tool as well. That’s somewhat reflected in the 4 Wide templates, but I don’t know that people have really picked up on the fact that if you start pushing the settings in the Print module you can get fairly creative effects out of what otherwise people might have thought of as a contact sheet generator.

The Split Toning controls in Develop actually are fun to use on color images as well as gray scale. They were created for creating duotone-like effects but they actually can be used in interesting ways to enhance color images as well. They’re not particularly good for correcting images. I’ve had people try to push them to correct color casts in the shadows and they’re not really built for that. If you want to put a color cast into your shadow they’re a great tool for that. Not so good if you want to take one out.

Finally, something that applies only to 1.0 and not Beta 4. I’ve been doing more dust spotting work on my images lately, I have to point people to the benefits of zooming to 1:1 (or higher), starting at the top left corner, and then just repeatedly pressing page down. Watch what happens when you get to the bottom of the column.

since1968: Mark, thanks for your time.

MH: You’re welcome.

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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.

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Back from Vacation · 93 words posted 11/09/2006 11:57 AM

Kickboxer, Burma

I’m back from vacation in Southeast Asia. One of my perennial challenges is sorting, tagging, and editing photos. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is an excellent workflow tool and is currently in public beta. If you haven’t tried it yet, it’s worth checking out.

I’ll write up Lightroom in greater detail shortly, as well as review a book on RAW conversion.

In the meantime, here’s a gallery of some of the best shots from the trip. You’ll find soldiers from the coup in Bangkok, kickboxers in Burma, silversmiths in Laos, and Chinese Opera in Singapore.

Novices, Shwe Dagon Pagoda, Yangon

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Cambodia 2002: A Photoset on Flickr · 24 words posted 01/20/2006 05:00 PM

I’ve posted a brief, new photoset to Flickr: Cambodia 2002. The pictures were shot with an old Canon AE-1 and have a warm, lo-fi vibe.

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Luminous Landscape on Adobe Lightroom · 109 words posted 01/10/2006 05:21 PM

I was set to write a lengthy walkthrough of Adobe’s excellent new Lightroom beta, but I see that Luminous Landscape has already done a better job of covering its features than I could. Short version: Lightroom rocks. If you’re on a Mac, download the beta and be sure to read the Luminous Landscape preview.

In the past, Mac users have sometimes felt left in the cold by Macromedia products when the Studio suite lagged behind its Windows counterpart in performance. But Lightroom zips right along on my PowerBook G4 (which only today feels old and creaky). Instant access to EXIF data, histograms, and thumbnails, all in a well-presented interface.

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Katrina Relief Auctions on Flickr · 168 words posted 09/02/2005 09:15 AM

Here’s another way to help victims of Katrina: buy a photo from the Katrina Relief Auctions on flickr. Several hundred photographers have put their pictures up for auction.

Here’s how it works:

I’ve added my “most favorited” picture to the auction.

I’ll send an 8×10” of Two Women, Sam Sand Dunes to the winner. The auctions end on September 15 at 11:59 PST. Whether you bid on my image, or anyone else’s, if you enjoy good photography and want to help victims of Katrina this is a fun way to contribute.

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I Heart the Burlington County Bridge Photographers Association · 244 words posted 07/21/2005 07:50 PM

Tacony-Palmyra Bridge OK, so there is no Burlington County Bridge Photographers Association, but there should be.

According to the New Jersey Courier Post, unauthorized photography of two Burlington County bridges is banned:

The Burlington County Bridge Commission has prohibited taking photographs of the Burlington-Bristol and Tacony-Palmyra bridges in the wake of the London train bombings.

The ban is just one of the new steps the commission took after the bombings, said bridge commission Executive Director George Nyikita, who declined to specify others for security reasons.

“We’ve had a bunch of homeland security measures in place since 9/11,” Nyikita said. “Whenever the alert is raised or lowered, we raise or lower the measures we take.”

The reason for such a ban is clear, Nyikita said.

“A trained engineer can photograph a bridge and pick out critical spots where a bomb could cause the most damage,” he said.

Thankfully, some amateur photographers will still be able to take pictures of the bridges in question:

Nyikita said the bridge commission is not ruling out amateur photographers all together, but said “we’d have to do a background check.”

Fortunately, if you’re not up for a background check you can just try google or google images.

Feeling safer yet?

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Hubert Van Es on that Famous Saigon Picture · 160 words posted 06/06/2005 10:10 AM

Thirty years ago, Hubert Van Es took one of the most famous pictures from the Vietnam conflict:

Thirty years ago I was fortunate enough to take a photograph that has become perhaps the most recognizable image of the fall of Saigon—you know it, the one that is always described as showing an American helicopter evacuating people from the roof of the United States Embassy. Well, like so many things about the Vietnam War, it’s not exactly what it seems. In fact, the photo is not of the embassy at all; the helicopter was actually on the roof of an apartment building in downtown Saigon where senior Central Intelligence Agency employees were housed.

He tells the story behind the story in the current issue of The Digital Journalist. According to Van Es, the photo shows the roof of an apartment building used by the CIA, and not the roof of the United States Embassy.

Great reading for photojournalists and travel photographers.

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A Quick One While He's Away.... · 165 words posted 03/15/2005 11:28 AM

since1968 has been quiet for much longer than I initially intended. Not only does freelance programming keeps me busy these days, but unstructured writing isn’t as fun as it used to be. I was all set to write a lengthy essay about what’s wrong with blogging, with footnotes and pull quotes from bored bloggers, but you already know the story: everything is too meta. There’s too much writing about writing, and not enough original content.

Boys at the Jama Masjid, Delhi The cure for boredom? Stop doing what’s boring you, and escape from self. Substance abuse and florid sexuality being off limits (I’m a pretty conservative guy), I did the next best thing: a trip to India. You can see some of the pictures on flickr.

About the writing: I’ve arranged with a third party to publish a column on a regular basis. More on that when the first article comes out. And I’m retooling since1968 into an online magazine, either a bi-monthly or quarterly. See you again when it’s ready.

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Review: In the Shadow of No Towers · 575 words posted 09/13/2004 02:03 PM

World Trade Center

Three years ago this week my neighborhood was attacked. I did what I do in any situation—took pictures—and, after gathering my wits, went off in search of my wife.

At first I was stunned. Stunned to be a refugee in my own country, leaving Manhattan on foot via Brooklyn Bridge.

Then I got angry. Not so much at the perpetrators (they’re dead after all), but angry at the President (for having the gall to stand on the rubble and talk about courage after flitting from state to state on the day of the attacks); angry at the management of my apartment building (which sued residents for breaking their leases in order to move out of a war zone); angry at an old acquaintance (who thought 5,000 people in Afghanistan needed to die to restore justice); angry at the countless man-on-the-farm interviews that appeared on CNN and NPR (where people in rural America thought they would be hit next); angry at the literary editor of the New Republic (who railed against attempts to make art out of the tragedy and in the same breath described the rubble as deathloam); angry at graphic designers (who thought themselves clever by removing the serifs from the “11” in “9/11” thereby making the date look like the twin towers—ooh, edgy!); but most of all, angry at the murder of 3,000 people.

In short, it fucked me up. I responded by trying to think about it as little as possible.

Art Spiegelman, on the other hand, responded by obsessing over the attacks to the point of paranoia, and the result is a beautiful series of broadsides collected in the new book In the Shadow of No Towers.

Not many works of art move so effortlessly between the personal and the global. When Mr. Spiegelman juxtaposes his frenzied search for his daughter, whose school was a mere four blocks from the towers, against an graphic of Bush and Cheney slitting the throat of an eagle that croaks “Why do they hate us??” the image is utterly unforced.

Tower Terrors Detail

The book’s most famous—and infuriating—panel shows the artist asleep on his desk, dreaming underneath the leering twin figures of Osama and Bush. Below, the caption reads “Equally Terrorized by al-Qaeda and by his own Government.”

Does he mean that? Can Mr. Spiegelman honestly believe that he (not the people of Iraq, not the people of Afghanistan) is as terrorized by George Bush as he is by al-Qaeda? Maybe not: he breaks up the larger image with a series of small panels titled “Notes of a Heartbroken Narcissist.”

The book’s abiding emotions are rage, honesty, paranoia, and disbelief; if you were there that day, how can you feel otherwise?

Sometimes Mr. Spiegelman gives the impression that he hates the current administration for its cowboy boots as much as its policies, but that’s consistent with the tenor of the times. I cannot believe my friends on the left smirk about seven minutes and “My Pet Goat.” I cannot believe my friends on the right suddenly care about IBM typewriters and superscript. Even if they don’t know it, theirs is the tempting voice of disengagement, the voice that whispers: Please to be stopping the train of history, I wish to step off.

Is that the best we can do?

But ultimately, Spiegelman is only trying to do what any of us who were there that day have tried to do and cannot: make sense of the insensible.

It still fucks me up.

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