Needs

I’m definitely in the category of pleased Lightroom users. While testing can be time consuming, it is rewarding when features you need show up in the program. That said we did get a bucket load of new features with version 1.1.
I’m starting to think forward to things I’d like to see in V2.0 (or even a 1.5 if such a thing were to happen). Here’s a few.

Output Sharpening: While we do have limited sharpening for Print, there is currently no way of specifying how sharp we need our exported images. Non constrained images have the Sharpening settings from the Detail panel applied. This is wonderful, but where it falls down is when we resize our images. Anything I export for use on the web at 700X467 is simply soft. There’s no 2 ways about it. I’m not happy with this. There needs to be some way to let Lightroom know that I need a sharper image going out. Yes, I could do this in a Photoshop Droplet, but I’m using the Post Processing to send the file to an FTP droplet for automatic upload.
Another way this would be useful is in Web. Wouldn’t it be great to set sharpening levels in our Web galleries? I think it would.

Lens Distortion corrections: Barrel and Pincushion distortion are common on the wide angle lenses required by our crop digital camera. I would be great if Lightroom could correct these in the RAW. A side addition to the crop tool in the form of perspective would be great too. I’d like the pull in to tie to the dimensions of the image too. What do I mean? Well when we fix perspective, a lot of the time we end up with squashed buildings. I’d like Lightroom to calculate the crop that visually corrects this.

Smart Collections: Eric Scouten discusses saved searches in a recent Lightroom Podcast. I’ve been requesting this for ages. While the programming end of it is no longer my forte, it seems to be a reasonable request that a collection can be formed based on specific criteria and updated automatically as new, relevant, material is added.

Website Generation: As an extension of a Web Gallery, it should be possible to create an entire gallery page with sub galleries in Lightroom.

Photoshop Handling improvements: When we do a roundtrip to Photoshop, I don’t want a file to appear in the Library until I actually save the file. This requires a hook in Photoshop (and of course it will only happen in a newer version of Photoshop) that can tell Lightroom that it is now saving a file and where it is saving it to. This way I can send files to Photoshop for HDR and only have the final image appear in the Library, not all the individual files. It would be the same for images sent for stitching.

Reallocation of pixel restrictions: With a 10,000X10,000 pixel restriction in Lightroom, it is hard to store panoramas internally as most are greater than 10,000px in one dimension. Even if this 100 Megapixel limit was kept for now, could we please change it so that the total Megapixel count is the limit, not the one sided affair we currently have. That would mean for example that a 20,000X5,000 pixel image would be importable.

There ya go. Just some ideas floating around my head about things I need currently! Back now to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.