Adobe Talks About the Future of Lightroom
Lightroom fans will be happy to hear that in the future Adobe may add support for high dynamic range photos and panorama stitching to the list of tools in the RAW image editing suite. Kevin Connor, Adobe’s senior director of professional digital imaging product management, didn’t commit to a definitive roadmap and stopped short of actually promising specific features, but rest assured Lightroom isn’t sitting still.
Connor tells CNet that HDR is on Lightroom’s radar. “It’s definitely a natural thing to do,” he tells CNet, adding that, “at some point, cameras will be capturing HDR [and] at some point, Lightroom will have support for that.”
For those who aren’t familiar with HDR photography, the basic concept is to combine multiple exposures into a single image which contains a much wider range of dark and light tones than you can get with a single exposure. The results range from a closer depiction of how the human eye sees a scene to very surreal, otherworldly images. Check out the HDR tag on Flickr to see some examples of HDR.
At the moment HDR photography requires you to manually shoot multiple images of the same scene at different exposures and then layer them together in Photoshop or similar editing software (as of CS2, Photoshop includes a Merge to HDR tool). If you’d like a tutorial on creating your own HDR images using the tools available today, check out the Backwinds blog.
For now HDR photography is primarily in the realm of more serious hobbyists and pros, but given that that’s roughly the target market of Lightroom we wouldn’t be surprised to see a future version of Lightroom include something like Photoshop’s Merge to HDR tool.
However, as Connor points out, most of Lightroom’s core functionality revolves around RAW and Adobe plans to keep it that way, so an HDR tool might come about only when the camera makers themselves begin to support HDR.
Connor drops some other tidbits about Lightroom’s future, including the possibility of a panoramic stitching tool and a much expanded SDK for outside developers to build more sophisticated plugins.
As for when these or any other new features might be available, Connor wouldn’t comment, but he did say that the incremental updates might be at an end, “I think we’ve done the bulk of what we wanted with the updates.” The logical conclusion is that Lightroom 2.0 is probably in the works, but of course when and what we might see in an actual release remains a mystery.
[via CNet]
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