Lightroom Tips

3 Features I Don’t Think We’ll Ever See in Lightroom (But I’d like to)

I’m sure we all have features we’d like to see in Lightroom (or lots of other programs too). And sometimes those features are so meaningful to us that we have no idea why everyone else doesn’t think so too. Well, my post is coming from a different place. I’m fully aware that these features are fairly random and probably only just applicable to me. They’re so specific that I actually don’t think we’ll ever see these features in Lightroom, but I thought it would be kinda fun to throw ’em out there. Here goes:

1) Auto Flag in Develop – I’d love it if when I work on a photo in the Develop module for say, 30 seconds, Lightroom would automatically flag that photo for me. Or even give me a setting in the Preferences panel that was something like: Auto-Flag A Photo If You’ve spent X seconds on it

Side Note: This is one of the reasons I love blogging. As I was writing this I thought of a pretty cool idea to get something close to what I want. I’m going to do a quick video on it today, and I’ll post it tomorrow 🙂

2) Focus Points– The point of focus may not matter for a lot of people. I know when I shoot portraits, I always focus on the eyes or face and, once in Lightroom, I really have no need to see the focus point. But for landscapes and travel, I tend to shoot the same photo while focussing on different areas. Sometimes I merge them together in Photoshop (focus stacking), and some times I don’t. But either way, it’d be useful for me to see them, without having to use another program (example of what I mean is below). Again, it’s not a feature I think I’ll get and probably not a big deal for most photographers. I think there’s probably bigger fish to fry then this one 🙂

focuspoint

3) Auto-Stack By Bracket – There is an Auto-Stack by Capture Time feature (it’s under the Photo > Stacking menu for those that haven’t seen this feature before). As you can imagine, it stacks photos by capture time. But it’s kinda flaky on me sometimes because I shoot a lot of long exposures. And I bracket A LOT. So I’d love to see a feature that let me stack photos by brackets. Basically, let me choose how many shots in my brackets (3, 5, 7, etc…) and then it would look through my folder and auto-stack the photos for me. Heck, I’ll even tell it where the first photo is, so it should be easy enough to figure out groupings of 3, 5, 7 or whatever after that.

So there’s 3 features that I’d love to see but don’t think I will. That said, don’t take this as a jab at Lightroom. Lightroom is an awesome program, and has definitely changed the way I manage and edit my photos. One of the reasons it’s awesome is because it hasn’t become the mammoth program that Photoshop has (sorry Photoshop, I still love you though). And if they included every feature that goobers like me wished for (which by the way, in 6 months my feature list will probably be different), then we wouldn’t have the awesome program we have today. But hey, it’s fun to wish right? 🙂

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