Lightroom has come so far from its early days. Each version has so much to add, and truly makes every upgrade worth the price. What’s the future for Lightroom? It’s hard to imagine, just because Lightroom 4 was so good, but here are four ideas I kick around on a daily basis.
True iPad Integration
Like this… only not so stretched. 🙂
There’s nothing I want more than the ability to work in Lightroom from my iPad on the go. How great would it be to kill time while on car rides culling your photos? Adobe has hinted that some type of integration is coming, but we’re yet to see it. Imagine how good our images would look on that new Retina screen, too. It doesn’t have to be a full edition of Lightroom – just enough to get work done away from the computer.
Let’s Get Spotty
One of the areas that Lightroom has grown the most in the last couple of editions is the ways that we can apply retouching options in small areas. These spot retouching options are one way
I would love to see Adobe bring the paintbrush over from Lightroom, and really beef up the ability fix things on a pixel level basis. This is really the only reason I still use Photoshop, and I want to completely break away from having to boot up Photoshop.
Network Support
Lightroom still doesn’t support opening catalogs on network drives. I’m not sure why.
Faster, Please
Adobe, I love you and most of your products. But I have to admit: you’re getting bad about bloat. Lightroom is probably the least bloated app, but I do think that LR4 is slower than LR3. I don’t have any data to show that, but it feels that way to me. Make sure you make Lightroom snappier and quicker than ever.
How about you?
What do you want to see in Lightroom 5? The comments are open for this – keep it friendly toward the fine people at Adobe. 😀