Shedding Light on Lightroom
This interview originally appeared on since1968.com. Reprinted with permission.
In the second part of a two-part interview, Mark Hamburg, founder of the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom project, discusses Mac-centric development, Lua scripting, and a secret Adobe IDE that may see the light of day soon. You can read the interview, conducted by Marc A. Garrett, on since1968.com
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, currently in beta, is Adobe’s newest tool for importing, managing, developing, and printing digital images. On January 19, 2007, 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 [Adobe Camera RAW] 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 Lightroom might not see the light of day. [Editor’s note: To find these podcasts, search for “Lightroom” in iTunes.] 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 the 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.
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
Marc A. Garrett was born in Japan and raised in Stone Mountain, Georgia. After receiving a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Georgia, he earned a Juris Doctor at the American University Washington College of Law. He has co-authored two computer books published by Macromedia Press and Apress; served as technical editor for several titles from Reilly and New Riders; authored the monograph Bleeding Kansas: The Shulers and the War on the Border; and written numerous articles for publications such as The National Jurist. He has also written for Digital Web Magazine.
Mr. Garrett specializes in web-based applications written in Ruby on Rails, ColdFusion, PHP, and ASP.NET. His recent clients include the state of Maine, Banfield pharmaceuticals, and a bond house with offices in New York and Hong Kong. He has worked in New York City, Singapore, and Washington, DC, where he currently lives with his wife.
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on January 29, 2007
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