wiredfool

I’ve been using Adobe Lightroom since the beta3 time frame, and I’ve got to say that it’s improved the results of my photography. There’s a noticeable quality improvement from the pre-Lightroom times. 1.0 has been solid, if not totally speedy on my Macbook. I have a couple of quibbles though:

• Sharpening — there’s very little control of sharpening. I’m used to (older) Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask, and the ability to control radius and threshold is quite useful.
• Noise Reduction — i can barely make out that it’s doing anything. At least it’s split into color and luminance noise sliders, so that the little it’s doing are on appropriate axes.
• ‘Channel’ Mixing — This is so important that they rounded up twice the usual number of channels. I wish that there was a good way to see the individual channel contribution quickly, like the cmd-123 in photoshop.
• The Slideshow produces a PDF. Great, but probably relies on some acrobat specific behavior to make a slideshow. This is the most useless of the 5 modes for me right now.
• Web Galleries are a nice way to dump out the images for a quick gallery. The HTML seems a little limited. I would have liked to see something similar to the flash gallery done in HTML. (Thumbnails across the bottom, in a frame/scrolling div, and the main image on top.
• Also in the Web Galleries, the flash versions look absolutely horrible if the image isn’t displayed at full size, since they don’t use a good scaling algorithm to adjust the image size. I’d rather that they simply let a smaller image float rather than scale an image with jaggies

All in all, that’s a pretty small list for a 1.0 product.