The team working on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom has a great attitude towards improving their software. They are passionate about photography, and apart from engaging with their customers, they also use their product daily to see how can they improve it. Apart from the main new features, they always select and implement dozens of smaller refinements and additions that they call "Just Do It" (JDI) features. In this tutorial, I will share with you what I learnt about these features from Lightroom and Camera RAW Product Manager Sharad Mangalick.
It was a great pleasure to be able to talk to Sharad, Lightroom Product Manager and learn about his team's process behind adding JDI features to Lightroom. These are mainly small improvements, but they all increase the usability and effectiveness of Lightroom.
They have a very organic process of implementing these features and everyone gets involved in forming the future of the application. They love to engage with the Lightroom community and do their best to improve the product to satisfy every users' need.
Every month the Lightroom team, where everyone is a passionate photographer, choose a theme that they take pictures of. A theme might be photos of the food they cook. At the end of the month, they compare their photos and use this whole process for exploring Lightroom and issues users might run into when working on their photographs.
At Adobe, everyone’s office is decorated with their creative work and they help each other to improve their photography skills. They are always using the product and scanning for ideas. Customer feedback is greatly appreciated.
In the following video I'm going to show you Sharad's and my top 5 JDI features introduced in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5:
Top Five JDI Features
1. Set as Target Collection
You can set any of your collections as a Target Collection and with Quick Collection's keyboard shortcut, B, you will be able to add photos quickly to them.
2. Full Screen View
No need for pressing lots of different shortcuts to get a full screen view of your photos any more. Simply press F and take look at your photo without any of the panels in the way.
3. Visualize Spots
There is a very useful new view option for the Spot Removal Tool, which allows you to reveal less visible spots on your photos caused by dust in the sensor or the lens.
4. Duplicate Local Adjustments
5. New Shortcut for the Spot Removal Tool
Press Shift + Q to quickly switch between Clone and Heal modes of the Spot Removal Tool.
Full list of all JDIs Introduced in Lightroom 5
Manage
- PNG file support
- True Full Screen Mode
- Configurable grid overlays
- Windows HiDPI
- Additional criteria for filters and Smart Collections
- Lock zoom position preference settings
- Keyboard shortcut to trigger tethered capture
- Direction field in the EXIF metadata panel
- Persistent place in Collections
- "Set as Target Collection" checkbox in Create Collection dialogue
- Drag Saved Location to a photo in the Map Module
- Integrity verification of DNG Files Edit
Edit
- LAB color readout
- Keyboard shortcut to toggle between Clone and Heal modes
- Duplicate local adjustments
- Duplicate linear gradients
- Aspect slider added to Manual Lens Corrections
- Persistent clipping indicators between Lightroom sessions
- Crop overlay aspect ratios
Share
- Behance Publish Plugin
- Visual indicator of favorite book pages
- Improved visualization of select book elements
- Transparent buttons for improved text creation in Books
- More page text metadata options
Take Part in Adding New Features to Lightroom
If you think you have ideas about how to improve Lightroom and make the next version even better feel free to contact the Lightroom team on one of the following forums:
Customers can also connect directly with Sharad Mangalick, Lightroom and Camera RAW Product Manager on Twitter: @smangalick
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