Saturday, April 20, 2013

Underwhelming or out of balance?

The User Apeal See-saw
Looking at the Adobe Forums and the social net, it is apparent that many users (not everyone) share my private view of the Lightroom 5 beta. It is very light for a major release, There is quiet an imbalance between what it delivers and the general user needs/expectations.Here is a incomplete list of things different folk (including me) had expected or desired to be included the next upgrade to Lightroom, but alas none have been delivered -
  • LAN support, Catalogues on the server
  • MultiUser access to shared catalogues
  • Face Recognition
  • Multi-image merges, HDR, Pano, Photofuse
  • Better Publish Services to #social #net #hashtags
  • Multi-Catalogue Sync/Exchange
  • Custom Brush Shapes
  • Non Alphabetical #keywording
  • Book –> eBooks (e-Pub)
  • Folder Flagging/colour
I still think Lightroom is great but I have drawn the see-saw so unbalanced because I fear Adobe might not realise, rather than achieving an equilibrium, the plank could break and the users will either just stick with version 3 or 4 or maybe abandon lightroom altogether, while they go looking for solutions to their needs elsewhere.
Version 3 was a dramatic improvement, I think everyone knows that and version 4 has some beautiful improvements in the Development module.. The Map, Book, Slideshow and Web stuff have had less universal appeal and are often not used. I can see the advanced brush healing feature saving a lot of tedium and time, but is that compelling enough for the majority of existing and potential new users? .
On a very cynical level, maybe more frequent, lighter and hopefully a little cheaper updates are just be a way for Adobe to make their Creative Cloud Service a more attractive proposition.

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