What's Right and Wrong About Lightroom 2 -- and how to improve its usability

An Open Letter to Adobe

© by Bill Wisser

In May 2009, Adobe asked for my feedback about their products. Here's what wrote about Lightroom 2:

With its blazingly fast processing speed, Lightroom 2 is in some ways a fantastic product that offers many great capabilities, based on its innovative, outside-the-box thinking about image processing.

But Lightroom's overall ease of use is horrible compared to Photoshop, ACR, and Bridge -- due to Lightroom's poorly conceived, narrowly rigid, and spectacularly un-intuitive interface design, plus Lightroom's peculiar tendency to be The Anti-Photoshop, that is, its tendency to do just about everything differently than Photoshop and Bridge.

For example: many basic keyboard shortcuts are incompatible between the Lightroom and Photoshop, for no apparent logical reason. Why should users have to learn two different sets of keystrokes for the same or similar tools in both programs? How does that help the inter-operability and ease-of-use of the various Adobe programs?

It's almost like there's a sibling rivalry in which the younger brother wants to do everything differently than the older, more established brother. And in its rebellion the young upstart rejects many good qualities of the older program out of hand.

The different keyboard shortcuts thing is only a small, but important example of this. The keyboard shortcuts of the two programs should be the same as, or at least as close as possible to, each other. Probably the best fix now is to create an option in Lightroom allowing each user to edit and create his/her own keyboard shortcuts. The standard ones currently provided by Lightroom for many of its tools are stunningly illogical.

Despite Lightroom's excellent processing speed (which is the reason I do use Lightroom when importing and doing preliminary processing of large photoshoots), Lightroom is a deeply flawed product whose astonishingly poor GUI design actually slows it down in many areas.

By far the worst conceptual flaw of Lightroom is its straightjacketed separation of the "Library" and "Develop" modules, apparently based on the rigid, linear, schoolmarmish workflow of some of Lightroom developers, who apparently think that: first, you edit the pictures, and, then, children, you develop the picture; and that these are wholly separate functions that we, who know best, have decided should be kept isolated from each other in strictly separate compartments.

Well . . . I understand and respect that there are many linear-minded people who probably do prefer that workflow of editing the take first and then developing the selects. Nothing wrong with that, at all! But not everyone thinks and operates that way.

I and many, many other photographers are more holistic -- or perhaps some would say disorganized, or at least differently organized -- and we edit and develop at the same time; and many of us find Lightroom's separate boxes approach unbelievably rigid and time-wasting.

For example:

If I'm in the Develop module and want to delete 10 images from the disk, I simply can't do it in the Develop module -- you can only delete one image at a time in the Develop module!

So, every time I want to do multiple deletions, I have to take the extra seconds and extra keystrokes, to shift back to the Library module -- and even then I can't stay in the Loupe view! No, you have to switch to the grid view to delete more than one image. And then you must make more keystrokes to shift back to the Develop module and into a loupe view there.

I simply don't find any logic in this awkward, time-consuming, back-and-forth procedure which the designers of Lightroom have forced upon us.

But the solution is simple: users should be able to select multiple images from the film strip in the Develop module and then delete them simply by pressing the delete key.

Like what one would do in Bridge.

Another example: some of Lightroom's most useful image comparison tools are only availalble in the Library module, not where I want them to be at hand in the Develop module where I do most of my work -- the two modules need to be combined, or at least users should be able to configure the tools to be available in either module.

Lightroom's designers have apparently made one small concession to those of us who protest their rigid, separate boxes mindset.

They have allowed us a so-called “Quick Develop” palette on the right-hand panel of the Library module, featuring little, push buttons to roughly adjust many but not all of the developing parameters.

What a joke!

I can do quick, accurate, preliminary adjustments of a raw file far faster with the full-powered developing tools in the Develop module than with this little, half-hearted, too small “Quick Develop” feature!

But though I find the Quick Develop palette way too slow to use, I love that it's there, because it reveals that the Lightroom developers sort of knew there was some need to overlap the functions of the two otherwise rigidly separated boxes. And undoubtedly there are plenty of folks who love “Quick Develop”. But for me it's only an underpowered afterthought that doesn't work well. I can move far faster through a take of hundreds of photos by using the Develop Module.

By the way, I find the Parametric Tone Curve in the Develop Module highly useful. With its segmented control of the curve, it can do certain adjustments better and easier than Photoshop's traditional Curves control.

But the reverse is also true: the traditional Photoshop Curves does many other things far better and faster than Lightroom's somewhat limited Parametric Tone Curve.

So where is the traditional full-featured Curves control that you get in Photoshop and ACR?

Missing in Action as far as Lightroom is concerned.

It continually astounds me that Adobe tries to niche-market Lightroom as the program designed “just for photographers” -- unlike Photoshop and Bridge, which many creatives besides photographers use -- yet Adobe fails to include in Lightroom this most basic and perhaps most powerful tool for photographers: the traditional Curves control.

It smacks of a certain desire to always do it differently in Lightroom compared to Photoshop, no matter what the cost in usability.

By all means, please keep the excellent, maybe even brilliant, innovations of Lightroom, and keep experimenting with alternative approaches -- that's great -- but in the process, please don't throw out powerful, time-tested Photoshop tools that are basic to photography.

In other words, please give us both types of curves in Lightroom!

Similarly, the problem with the Spot Removing tool in Lightroom is that while it's quicker than Photoshop's traditional cloning or healing brush tool in certain situations (such as removing a few isolated spots from a basically simple background like a plain blue sky), the automatic sampling action of Lightroom's spot removal tool is no substitute for the Photoshop's traditional cloning tool in many other situations.

Because Photoshop's traditional cloning tool, in which the user choses the sample area manually first, is far more useful, accurate and FASTER in the at least equally common task of seamlessly removing spots from a complex, highly detailed background.

So this is another instance of Adobe thinking outside the box and coming up with a useful innovation -- but then depriving users of the older tool, even though the new tool is not a complete substitute at all, and is actually less capable in numerous situations.

Again, the solution is simple, give the Lightroom user both tools!

Otherwise the Develop panels in Lightroom 2 are fairly good, though there should be a simpler way to quickly reset various sets of parameters individually.

But overall, why can't Lightroom 2 be more like Bridge/ACR/Photoshop, where access to the tools is easier, and the workflow is so much smoother, cleaner, faster, well-coordinated, and far more elegant.

There's a certain fussy, wheels-within-wheels, baroque complexity and density to the Lightroom design ethos -- an inability to do things simply.

And a tendency to be confusing.

I once read regarding web design that anytime a visitor to website becomes confused, and doesn't immediately see how to get from A to B or C on the site, and hesitates . . . it's bad design.

Now, admittedly a program like Lightroom is not as generic as a website, and users need some training to understand the tools and how to use them. But even so, making things as easily understandable -- as fast and transparent as possible -- surely must be a goal of good design.

In that regard, Lightroom falls short time after time. This isn't a fatal flaw, Lightroom is, after all, a young program.

It's very understandable that it lacks a smooth, well-engineered fit and finish on many of its parts.

But it weakens the program. Examples abound:

One of the worst and most confusing of Lightroom's various pop-up panels is the Filename Template Editor. For example, under “Numbering” it offers import numbering, image numbering, and sequence numbering -- do you know the difference?

Nowhere on the panel is it explained, so after I chose the wrong kind of numbering for my needs and got a lot of numbering I didn't want, I looked it up on the web and eventually found a proper explanation. By the way, the first help article on this topic in Lightroom Help briefly mentions the three alternative kinds of numbering, but fails to explain how they differ. Not very much help there!

Wouldn't it be smarter to remove all this ambiguity by simply defining the terms right there on the panel for the user to see at a glance -- or at least to put a little link on the panel that opens an explanatory note -- thus minimizing the potential for confusion and mistakes.

Wouldn't this eliminate the need for the user to expend time scouring the web for an explanation about how Lightroom's somewhat arcane numbering scheme actually works?

Wouldn't that be smarter user interface design?

Many of Lightroom's pop-up panels are really ugly -- I don't mean just aesthetically, though they are, but I mean in terms of usability and common sense.

For instance, at least one, I forget which, uses a confusing double-negative, stating that if you do a certain change it will be “not undoable.”

Now, let's see, what does that mean? If a change is “undoable,” does that mean it cannot be done? So then not undoable would mean it is doable. Or does “undoable” mean that once a change is done, it can be undone?

OK, if undoable means that, i.e, that a change can be undone, then “not undoable” means that a change cannot be undone -- IN PLAIN ENGLISH, IT'S “PERMANENT.”

Although some people will get it immediately, the double-negative “not undoable” is so massively computer-geeky as to be unacceptable in a consumer application.

Before I was a professional photographer, I was an award-winning newspaper reporter, and I'd be delighted to work as a paid consultant to Adobe to help translate awkward geek-speak instructions of this sort this into more conversational English, such as:

“Note: If you make this change, it will be permanent, and you won't able to change it back.”

No ambiguity there.

In general, the double negative is best used for comic effect (“scandal was not unknown to Madonna”), or understated emphasis (“he explained not unkindly”), or dialect (“We don't need none!”); but should not be used in technical writing or instructions, where clarity is essential.

I'm serous about doing consulting for Adobe - you can reach me at bill@billwisserphoto.com and at 305-672-2448.

But here are just a few of the many, many points I could make about Lightroom's interface design:

Second only to Lighroom's frustrating separation of the organizing and developing functions into separate modules, the most user-unfriendly thing about Lightroom is, in my opinion, its intensely confusing and unforgiving complexity when moving, importing, exporting and generally keeping track of where files (or their related data) are.

At least compared to the drag-and-drop simplicity and easy-to-understand logic of the file browser, folder-based, directory structure of Bridge, I found Lightroom's data base-related protocols a nightmare.

This is despite Adobe repeated claims that Lightroom supposedly simplifies things for photographers and saves them time!

If iLightroom were so simple, fast, and easy-to-use, believe me, there wouldn't be a market for all the countless workshops, web tutorials, books, magazine articles, both free and high-priced instructional videos, not to mention all the various gurus and so-called evangelists who have built a cottage industry out of trying to explain Lightroom.

Now, Point One:

I do understand that the, to me at least, confusing complexity of file handling in Lightroom arises from the database nature of Lightroom's construction, the very thing that makes Lightroom's wonderful, non-destructive processing speed so fast.

And Point Two:

After making tons of mistakes in this area, and seeming to lose files, and cursing Lightroom virtually every time I opened it, I read and watched a lot of tutorials until I got to the point where I could more or less understand how Lightroom's file managment approach works -- at least understand it enough so I am able to move/import/export files in the program -- but that doesn't mean I like Lightroom's file handling system in its present state.

(By the way, it may be relevant to note that I'm a big fan of Adobe's dng format for many reasons, but perhaps most importantly because it packages the original raw file and its sidecar file together, into just one, much easier to manage file).

In any event . . . I believe that Lightroom can and should be vastly improved by putting a simpler and more user-friendly drag-and-drop interface atop its underlying database structure, giving the user the best of both worlds, and I have some specific ideas about how to design and implement this.

If you're interested, contact me and we'll talk.

By the way, I liked and learned a lot from the Lightroom podcasts Adobe engineer and evangelist George Jardine produced and distributed via iTunes. The shows featuring the Lightroom engineering and design team were as interesting as the ones featuring various photographers.

In any event, thank you for reaching out and asking Lightroom users to comment, and thank you for Photoshop and for Lightroom!

Though I deeply believe that Lightroom's user interface needs a major re-think and redesign along the lines I've suggested, Lightroom's core, non-destructive developing speed -- and the willingness of its designers to to be innovative and experimental -- makes its usability and user interface flaws all the more frustrating, and well-worth improving!

Best Regards,

bill@billwisserphoto.com

© Bill Wisser 2009