Thursday, January 20th 2011

Wish list for Lightroom 4

Lightroom 3 was released in June 2010, so Lightroom 4 is probably quite a way off still. Even so, it is always fun to speculate, discuss and guess about upcoming software. So here are a few features and fixes that would be very useful – should anyone at Adobe be listening reading.

• Local white balance adjustment using the adjustment brush. Would be great to have for mixed lighting situations.
• Larger white balance picker that can sample a small area of pixels for a more accurate average in noisy images.
• Sharpening in the slide show module. As it is now I need to export all the photos first if I want sharpening for sreen.
• A real clone brush that isn’t limited to spots.
• RGB curves for full control over colour balance and unlimited creativity.
• Fix the cropping tool! It is currently very hard to make fine adjustments with the crop tool since both the border and the image moves. Keep the image still and make the border a 1 px dashed line, please!
• Fixed auto sync behaviour. If I select a number of photos in the film strip, activate auto sync and hit + + + + to increase the exposure by 0,4 stops I want the exposure for each photo to be increased relative to whatever it was before, not relative to 0.

Those features/fixes are all relatively doable. But if I allow myself to get a bit more dreamy, here’s what I’d like …

• HDR merging/tonemapping. I have no idea how this would be implemented, but I’m sure the Adobe boffins could work it out!
• Panorama stitching. Again, no idea how. I just know I’d love it if I didn’t have to go to an external app for this.

Ps. I am guessing that the Lightroom 4 icon will be a white one, something like my quick mockup above. ^^

Posted at 23:07. Tags: Lightroom 4. Categories: Lightroom, photography. Both comments and trackbacks are closed.

14 Responses to this post:

1. Allan Beaudette says:

   January 21, 2011 at 14:23

   It sounds simple but what about a spell checking option for data entered as keywords and metadata.

2. Wish list for Lightroom 4 says:

   January 23, 2011 at 13:41

   […] http://davidnaylor.org/blog/2011/01/wish-list-for-lightroom-4/ […]

3. Daryl says:

   February 18, 2011 at 08:58

   I would add.
   Lab colour curves as well
   Better keyboard shortcuts and customising options.
   A good list though
   Cheers Daryl

4. Lloyd says:

   May 26, 2011 at 15:31

   Face recognition

5. Samuel says:

   June 13, 2011 at 10:56

   I wish that LR 4 will be able to read the picture control data off from the RAW file.
   Thanks.

6. David Naylor says:

   June 13, 2011 at 12:12

   I agree face recognitions would be nice, as long as I can connect a certain face with a keyword of my choice.

   Samuel, what do you mean by picture control data?

7. hsbn says:

   June 14, 2011 at 00:23

   @ Samuel: never gonna happen.
   @David: he meant RAW file proprietary information such as picture style, high-tone priority, things that only readable on proprietary software .

8. Robin says:

   September 20, 2011 at 17:54

   Need to be able to add more than 1 music file

9. Robin says:

   September 20, 2011 at 17:55

   Need to be able to add multiple music files

10. Daniel says:

    October 15, 2011 at 21:34

    I would like to see :
    – Multi User support (e.g. that the rest of my family can view and export fotos, but not change them)
    – Support for Network file storage location (e.g. to have the catalog on a NAS (its possible today, but only if the drive is mapped to a letter which is kind of unflexible))

11. Lightroom 4 soon? « David Naylor: Blog says:

    November 1, 2011 at 22:29

    […] Who knows what Lightroom 4 will bring in the way of features. Here’s what I would like to see. […]

12. Processor says:

    November 29, 2011 at 12:49

    CUDA ! CUDA ! CUDA ! CUDA ! CUDA ! compatible ( or OpenCL )

13. David Naylor says:

    November 29, 2011 at 13:20

    You mean hardware acceleration? Yes, that WOULD be nice.

14. Bill says:

    February 18, 2012 at 17:51

    I would like to be able to set a default aspect ration for cropping. If I have a project and need all 5×7’s let me set the aspect ration and use it for the entire project.