Lightroom for Your Camera

The Most Important New Photo App Has a Fatal Flaw

Adobe launched Creative Cloud 2014 today, and along with it several new mobile apps. Photoshop Mix lets you blend layers using a touch-optimized version of Photoshop’s powerful Quick Select tool. Line and Sketch are drawing apps designed to work with Adobe’s own stylus and ruler accessories.

But the one I’m most excited about wasn’t a surprise at all. As promised, Lightroom mobile is now available for iPhone. Like the iPad version, it’s free, but requires a Creative Cloud subscription. (The bundle of Lightroom and Photoshop for $9.99/month is now a permanent pricing plan, by the way.)

Despite having the exact same features, Lightroom for iPhone is a very different thing than the iPad version. Because this is Lightroom running on your camera.

I’m a “serious” photographer. I have cameras with red dots and and lenses with red rings. But I also take a ton of photos with my telephone. Having the power of Lightroom running on your actual camera is a major, important change to mobile photography. When you snap a shot, or, more likely, a series of shots on your iPhone, and then easily (even automatically) upload them to your Lightroom catalog, where you can then edit, flag, and now rate them, with all changes synced to your master catalog, you have a speed and power in mobile photography that will have you rethinking your iPhone’s role as a “casual” camera.

A New and Promising Workflow

Effortlessly getting your fresh iPhone snaps into Lightroom is great in a few ways. I started out wishing for nothing more than metadata management in a mobile Lightroom app, and I have productively used that functionality, but now I’m hooked on having the power of Lightroom’s editing controls in my pocket. Lightroom’s exposure, contrast, color temperature, clarity and shadow/highlights controls produce significantly better results than any other mobile photo editing app.

But the real power comes when you launch Lightroom desktop, and see all of your photos there, with their edits as nondestructive metadata. You can continue making your photos look their best, and the edits will be synced back to your iPhone—even those that Lightroom mobile can’t modify. This means Lightroom mobile is rendering the full Adobe Camera Raw engine, which bodes well for increased editing capability in the future.

iPhone photos thoughtfully processed in Lightroom can look shockingly good. Here are a few examples from my recent trip to Taiwan.

If you choose to automatically upload all your iPhone photos to Lightroom (the aggressive default when you first run the app), you could even dispense with syncing your photos to your computer the old-fashioned way (if it weren’t for pesky video).

The Fatal Flaw

Lightroom mobile is a work in progress, and it’s not perfect. I’d kill for user-created presets synced from desktop Lightroom. You don’t have control over where on your computer your uploaded photos are synced to. And when sorting through photos, you have to switch between flagging mode or star rating mode (new in version 1.1 for iPad as well), rather than having both available at once. You can’t even see both flags and stars at the same time, even though there’s plenty of space on the screen.

But the biggest flaw represents a fundamental misunderstanding of mobile photography. Lightroom mobile strips important metadata from your photos, including time/date and location. That’s right, Lightroom mobile kills one of your iPhone’s best camera features—the always-on GPS.

This means that if you edit a photo in Lightroom for iPhone, save it back to your Camera Roll, and then share it, the social media service you share to won’t know when or where the photo was shot. Apps like Facebook and Instagram use this info to make sharing better. If you’re more privacy-minded like me, maybe you use a personal diary app like Day One. Day One uses photo metadata to automatically create a journal entry with the correct date stamp and GPS location. But if you try this which a shot saved from Lightroom mobile, no such information is found, and the journal entry is created using the current time and location.

Every 99¢ (or free) photo app gets this right. That Lightroom doesn’t is an embarrassing omission.

Just The Beginning

I have high hopes that Adobe will address these shortcomings. We’re only at version 1.1 of Lightroom mobile. It’s almost my go-to mobile photography app (competing with Mattebox, an awesome app that offers custom filter building and sharing, and that leaves my metadata alone).

With proper metadata handling, user presets, and the ability to customize where synced shots are stored, Lightroom mobile could become a must-have for anyone who uses their telephone as a camera, which is approximately everybody in the world.

Lightroom mobile is available on the iTunes App Store for iPhone and iPad. It requires Creative Cloud, which is $9.99/month for Lightroom and Photoshop. Or get a year of full Creative Cloud membership for $50 off from B&H until June 20.

Lightroom Mobile

Adobe has released Lightroom mobile, an iPad companion app for Lightroom that syncs with your desktop catalog via Creative Cloud.

Is it the mobile companion app to Lightroom I asked for two years ago? Not exactly. It’s both much more, and a little less.

Lightroom mobile is based on the rather remarkable achievement of running the entire Adobe Camera Raw engine on your mobile device. This, combined with the recent addition of lightly-compressed proxies to the DNG format, means that Lightroom mobile can accurately edit the full range of values in your raw originals, and then sync those adjustments back to your main catalog.

If the editing features are miraculous, the sorting and metadata features are, let’s say, streamlined. The only thing you can sync are Collections. I don’t use Collections as a part of my organization, which means I have to create them just for the purpose of syncing. You choose which Collections sync, up to 60,000 photos.

You can flag and reject shots. That’s it. No star ratings, color labels, no keyword tags. You can move/copy shots from one synced catalog to another though.

I’d suggested syncing the catalog, not the photos. I wanted organizing, not editing. Turns out, I love having the editing control. But it does come at the expense of speed and storage requirements. You can rapidly flip through shots and flag or reject them with a swipe. But as you do, Lightroom will be loading that whole DNG proxy.

Lightroom mobile lets you sit back on your couch and rapidly triage a shoot, flagging and rejecting shots easily. There’s more than enough editing control to make an informed decision of whether a shot is a keeper or not.

If you collaborate, it’s pretty cool to hand off your iPad to a colleague (or spouse) and ask them to pick their favorites. Keep the desktop version up as they do, with a filter for Flagged, and watch your screen fill up with their selects.

I wanted a mobile companion app to help me keep up with the endless task of sorting and organizing my main catalog. We didn’t quite get that. Instead, we got some organization and metadata tools, and impressive, if not as obviously utilitarian, editing capabilities.

I like Lightroom Mobile enough that I bought a new iPad with LTE so I could use it to its fullest. It’s super useful, even if it’s not exactly what I wanted. Which is exactly what a 1.0 should be. With that in mind, here’s what I’d love to see in future updates:

• Lightweight syncing of my entire catalog. I don’t need DNG Proxies for everything, but a thumbnail would be great.
• Keyword tags, and the ability to search/sort by them.
• Reverse geocoding. Show me my photos taken near where I’m standing, or let me tag a photo with my current location.
• Presets. The ones in Lightroom mobile are Adobe-supplied. I’d like to be able to selectively sync presets from Lightroom Desktop.
• Collaboration. I’d like to be able to share photos with a collaborator and let them set metadata separately from mine. Let me, the agency, and the client all make our selects, and then allow only me to see how they overlap.

Lightroom mobile is a free download on the App Store, and requires one of several several existing Creative Could plans, including the Photoshop Photography Program at USD $9.99/month. It requires Lightroom 5.4, also released today. An iPhone version is coming soon.

Adobe Shows Off That Lightroom Thing I Described

Lightroom product manager Tom Hogarty appeared on Scott Kelby’s show The Grid and showed a “technology preview” of Creative Cloud-synced raw photo editing on an iPad.

Sounds familiar!

And although Tom mostly showed visual editing, necessary for a sexy demo, he spent a good deal of time talking about the value of organizational tools such as sorting and reading, which is where I think the real value lies, as I wrote last year:

What I want from a mobile Lightroom companion is a way to utilize whatever idle time I might have here and there for productive work on my main Lightroom Catalog. I don’t want to send new photos to it. I don’t want to adjust exposure and color temperature. I just want to do what I never seem to have enough time to do at home: housekeeping.

Half the reason I use Lightroom over the other DAM/raw processing tools out there is that I like it better. The other half is that I love the way Adobe engages with the community. You can have a relationship with Adobe, and software is a relationship.

So thanks for the tease Tom! Looks great. Just please dodn’t get so wrapped up in the sexiness of mobile editing that you forget about the incredible value of sorting and tagging on the go.

Plastic Bullet for iOS on Sale

They did what to my instathingy?

Facebook just bought Instagram for $1 billion. A lot of Instagram users are worried about what will become of the service they love.

The free service that they somehow thought would never go away or change. I guess they never read this article.

I may not have $400 million in my pocket, but I’m truly proud to work with a great company called Red Giant that has a crazy business model: They make something they hope you’ll love, sell it to you at fair price, and support it like crazy.

Plastic Bullet for iOS is on sale today for ¢99.