A few weeks ago, Adobe opened a brand new public forum where feature requests can be discussed and user-reported bug reports can be tracked. Have you dropped in yet? The new website is: http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/products/photoshop_family_photoshop_lightroom
Lightroom’s very community driven, so the team love to hear your ideas. What would you like to see in a future version of Lightroom?
Over the last few weeks we’ve seen some really well written feature requests, and some that are more difficult to follow. What can you do to increase the chances of being heard? There are a few things to bear in mind…
What is the request?
Think before you post. You may understand what you mean, but that won’t help if no one else does.
Imagine you’re trying to sell your idea to the team, so make it clear and concise. Unnecessary waffle won’t help your case.
Stick to the subject. Don’t go off on a tangent or muddle multiple requests in the same thread as they’ll get lost.
How would you imagine it working within Lightroom?
Show that you’ve bothered to take them time to understand how Lightroom works first. Try not to mingle questions with requests – if you’re not sure of something, ask the question or look in the documentation, and then come back with a well thought out request. It stands a better chance.
How will it help your workflow?
Describe why you want it – the problem you’re currently hitting, and how this new feature would solve that problem. The team need to understand how your idea fits in, as they may come up with an even better way of solving your problem.
Get support!
If you feel strongly about a feature, and you know other people do too, get them to vote!
Exposure blending. It’s something that you could do with film easily (double exposures) but still can’t do with Lightroom. I assume that it would require some enhancements to XMP and the ability to create a virtual copy of an image that included layers of another image. Stitching panorama’s is similar technically (in terms of blending and aligning layers) so it’d be great to see that too.
I love Lightroom and the non-destructive processing of my CR2 files… anything that needs to be exported as TIFF’s to a separate program breaks the workflow and means I generally don’t bother. I wish I could do it in Lightroom.
[Mmmmmmm, put in a request then! – VB]