This is going to have to be an abbreviated part two since I am off to Berlin for the rest of the week. Achtung! While I am still enjoying doing most of my work in Lightroom, there are several major annoyances, real limitations that I want to explore. It goes back to Mode Mania, what I described last time as a decision on the part of the engineers to implement features in sets instead of as tools. It is as if there was this big flowchart at Adobe, and on the flowchart was “The Workflow”, and woe be it to the user who wants to use a tool outside of it’s place in the workflow. Here is an example of what I mean.
See the picture up top? On the left is Lightroom in Survey Mode. You want me to explain what Survey Mode is? Sorry, I can’t do that. I am sure there is some part of a photographers workflow where you want to plod image by image comparing one against the other to find the best shot, what Aperture calls the “pick.” For comparison I have included the Aperture screenshot of a similar mode, actually, I don’t know if it is a mode or not. It is just a discontinuous selection of images, I just command-clicked on four images from the film strip and they display, rearranging to fill the available space. It is pretty simple really, a discontinuous selection. Can Lightroom do that? Nope. You see, they invented this “mode” where you are supposed to do that, if you pick any number of images, and hit N I go into Survey mode, and the little X’s that you might not be able to see, that is how you get rid of an image in the mode.
Well lets go into how many ways this is silly. Why not just use command-click to choose any number of images as Aperture does, and indeed, the entire OS for that matter, if you want to pick a random assortment of anything, you command-click, or shift-click if the choice is continuous. So what does the “N” give you in lightroom? It gives you the “X’s. That’s all. So when you click the “X”, what does that do? It just deselects the picture from the survey. So now we have two keys, N, and X, all to do what we already know how to do with command-click. At first I was hesitant to click the X, because, what does that do? Does it reject the picture, or send it somewhere where I don’t know where it is? But no, it is fairly benign, mainly because it does nothing. But the point is, the behaviour is uncertain, and it goes outside the familiar vocabulary of the OS to do what the OS already does.
There is also a compare mode, where you can see two-up at a time. You can arrow-key through subsequent images to compare, and then swap any new image for the “select”. It is pretty crude next to the Aperture implementation, I think largely because the stacking feature was added late in the development game, and really it is the stacking feature that is limiting.
Stacks in Aperture-you can even stack other crap like contact sheets…
What Aperture gets right is the display of groups of images, stacks have space between them and are discrete, in LR, the grid of photos is never broken, so stacks only look distinct by a shaded border, that is easily lost. A “select” is not anything to LR, just a mode feature that goes nowhere. I can promote an image to be at the top of the stack by pressing shift-S, but this is not the same as making it the “select” in the stack. Why this is, I have no idea. Virtual copies is another LR feature that was added late I believe, and it suffers from mode-itis as well. You can only create a virtual copy from within the Library mode. In Develop, the option is gone. You CAN create a snapshot, a Photoshop term for how a file looks at a particular state in its edit history, a great idea, but these are two features that are really one, a virtual copy would do the same, assuming you could make one in Develop.
Stacks in Lightroom. Can you find them, one is open, another is closed…I highlighted the closed one. Too easy.
There are other weird inconsistencies in LR also, another is in the grid and loupe modes of the Library. Why it is called loupe, again, I have no idea. It is just one image from the library, and not a magnified view necessarily. But when you are syncing metadata, you can only do it in the grid view, despite the fact that you have filmstrip view at the bottom from which you could select a number of images. So you have to switch into grid view to do that. Over and over again, I find myself switching modes, all with different shortcuts, E, G, N, D, etc., they are easy to remember, but they seem to compensate for engineers forgetting how to create a toolset that simply operates across the program. If I can see one image or five or five thousand, what does that mean in terms of what I want to do at a particular point? My answer is that it means nothing, and task-based metaphors for programs are, in my opinion, a poor way to design a program.
Next time
Next time I will talk about LR’s metadata editing and syncing capabilities. You migh see where it is going. Yes there are too many buttons to press.
I agree with your comments about Lightroom’s limitations and find Aperture is much better designed in this regard.
It’s funny though, although I have may images managed in Aperture, I like the visual design of Lightroom better. To my eyes, it is a beautiful interface.