I was pleasantly
surprised today as I went through my podcast playlist in iTunes to find the first two episodes of a new audio podcast
about the Adobe Lightroom beta [iTMS link]. The
podcast features members of Adobe's Lightroom development team chatting with some of the photographers who offered
input into the Shadowland project, which was the development precursor to Lightroom.Episode 1 features photographer and Photoshop guru Jeff Schewe talking with three key members of the Adobe Lightroom team--product manager George Jardine, lead engineer and "founder of the Lightroom team" Mark Hamburg, and engineer Kevin Tieskoetter. This episode focuses on printing and color management in Lightroom, with some other juicy tidbits (like Jardine's view of the ideal marriage--oh, George) thrown in for good measure.
This podcast is very enlightening on several levels:
- First, it offers fascinating insight into the Lightroom development process and the thinking of the Adobe team.
- Second, it brings home how very receptive the Lightroom team has been to the input and practical viewpoints of its audience, insofar as they are represented by Schewe, Bruce Fraser and other professional photographers.
- Third, I was struck by how transparent the development of this product has been, particularly as compared to the hush-hush nature of prerelease programs for other Adobe software (which shall rename nameless to protect the innocent).
Printing from Lightroom:
The team has tried to make printing from Lightroom simple, easy, and fast. Hamburg says that inkjet printing from Photoshop is far more difficult than it ought to be. Draft mode printing in Lightroom speeds things up quite a bit. Instead of rendering each image from the original raw file, Lightroom takes the largest rendered image that's in the cache and uses that instead, providing sufficient resolution for most contact sheets.
You don't get true output sharpening when you do draft printing from Lightroom.
Schewe says he's been comparing output from Photoshop and Lightroom and has been able to achieve parity. Being able to set up for multiple prints, rather than document by document print settings, is one advantage of Lightroom.
Jardine asks if we'll be able to save driver-specific settings to achieve a one-button print job. Hamburg answers that the team would like to, but the OS doesn't make that easy at this point. You can't access specific printer settings until you hit Print and have already sent data to the printer. The Lightroom team is "leaning on the powers that be" to try to move some of that upstream so that it can be captured and stored in a preset.
Color management in Lightroom:
The upcoming Lightroom Build 3 will fix color management rendering intents, which were broken in previous builds.
Jardine asks what is the minimal amount of configuration for acceptably color-managed output from Lightroom? Kevin and Mike explain that all you have to do is go to the Print module, select a template, and leave color management set to Managed by Printer. Here's the key -- in the printer driver settings you should specify Color Sync (which is not usually the default) and the paper you're using. The printer driver should then pick up the right profile and do the right thing with it.
Soft Proofing:
Schewe says you've got to have soft proofing so that you can predict what the image will look like when the ink hits paper and you see the reduced dynamic range of the final print, so that you can tweak the tone curve and color rendering. Soft-proofing also allows you to be more economical with ink and paper; you don't have to make lots of prints if you can predict what the image will look like. In addition to Lightroom, you need a calibrated and profiled monitor and a good printer profile for soft proofing.
Printer profiles:
Tieskoetter solicits Schewe's opinion on printer profiles, asking: if a user does not have a custom profile he built for his printer, is it best to let the printer manage the color or selecting one of the profiles that came with the printer as a custom profile and turning off color management at the driver level? Schewe answers that the ideal is to have the default printer driver profiles for printer and paper be accurate. All the major printer manufacturers--Epson, HP, and Canon--are now realizing that accurate profiles are important for printing and soft-proofing. For example, Epson's K3 UltraChrome printer profiles are much better than other printer profiles. If you don't have a custom profile, Lightroom's Print module does seems to be using Color Sync the right way. The default profile is selected from within the print driver via Color Sync, and that does seem to work. You will need custom profiles if you're using specialty third-party papers. Schewe reports that he has gotten excellent results using custom printer profiles and turning color management off in the print driver. Hamburg adds that you can also use the Color Sync utility to change the printer's default preferences, although that is not well publicized or documented. Schewe warns that you don't want to do that; it's too messy.
Third-party module development:
Users on the forums have been asking about plug-ins for Lightroom, which brings up the issue of how much flexibility there will be for the development of Lightroom modules by third parties. Hamburg explains that other than some fundamental pieces that are owned by the app, the Library, Develop, Print and Slideshow user interfaces are built as modules using an architecture that should eventually be revealed to developers. So third parties should be able to build additional modules. For example, a developer could build another module that will send images to whatever output you want or do additional organizational things with them. The upshot of this discussion is that there may be the potential for third-parties to make new modules after version 1 ships, but extending existing modules might be more difficult.
Check out Episode 1 of the Adobe Lightroom Beta podcast to hear these highlights and more.
