[Digikam-devel] What Others Do? Adobe's Lightroom

[Mikolaj Machowski]

Hello,

Lightroom
=========

Today Adobe announced its new program for processing photography:
Lightroom.  It may be interesting to know What Others Do. I am writing
basing on article from:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/software/lightroom1.shtml by
Michael Reichmann.

This is not complete review of article or program. Just few highlights
what digiKam also could do.

What is Lightroom? Few words from Michael: 

	In a word or two, Lightroom is best described as next-generation
	photographer's software. Simply calling it a raw file converter,
	or an image processing program, would miss the fact that
	Lightroom also is designed for sorting, cataloging, presenting
	and printing ones files.  It is intended to offer photographers
	the vast majority of the tools that they need when working on
	their images ? all under one roof. And, even though it's from
	Adobe, it breaks with a number of the Photoshop and Camera Raw
	paradigms, providing photographers with new, powerful, and in
	many cases easier to use tools for processing their images.

Few comments on general interface:
----------------------------------

1. Search directly in main window, no separate dialogs
2. No tree views
3. Many image manipulation tools like white balance are available
   directly in main window
4. Thumbbar in main window
5. "Module" window in top-right corner shows base info about currently
   highlighted object: histogram, filename, base EXIF info
6. Images in main Library view (digiKam Album view) are without any
   comment, title, etc.
7. When hovering mouse over image thumbnail some options are made
   accessible like: rotate image left or right, (un)rate it.
8. Nice modification key: when pressing Mac Option key and clicking
   image it will be rotated by 90 degrees.
9. Collection - ad-hoc group of files to work on, perform common
   operations etc. Very handy - you can check how it work in Picasa.
10. Very rich slideshow configuration and export (HTML, PDF, Flash)
    possibilities.

Meta information
----------------

1. Keywords are written in input dialog. In this way user don't have to
   manage tree like structure but is keeping "live words".

Storage
-------

1. Files are keep in disk in non-destructive manner. There is base file
   but all manipulations are added only as some tagged info.
2. Files can be copied/moved into Lightroom library but can be also only
   referenced and stay in their initial location.
3. When importing user can apply keywords and tag names during process.
4. I love export dialog: user can set: directory to export, format of
   images, quality, dimensions, also extensive possibilities to rename
   file to contain meta info in its file name like EXIF data, date,
   name, number in export etc.

m.