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Lightroom 3 user interface
Jul. 24th, 2010 11:57 pmSue and I are taking a class on Lightroom 3, the photo-editing software for people who aren't quite ready for Photoshop (yet who want more power than the limited set of controls in something like Picasa). In general, I've been quite pleased with the improvements I've been able to make already. On the way, I have bumped into a few rough edges.
There's a basic feature in Lightroom called collections. Photos can be in multiple collections. Adding photos to a new collection is easy. Adding photos to an existing collection is unnecessarily confusing. First, there doesn't appear to be a menu option to do that. Second, the documentation (and at least one book) tell you to drag the photo from the grid view and drop it in the collection. Sounds simple enough, but every time I tried to do it, nothing happened. Why? To make a long story short, the images in the grid view have a band around them that makes them look like a slide (for any youngsters that may be reading this, slides are a pre-digital technology used to broadcast pictures onto walls). In Lightroom, you have to click (and drag) on the image and not the band around it to add it to a collection.
Anyone who has worked with slides knows that you handle them by the edge (unless you want to broadcast your fingerprint along with the image). People who use Lightroom are likely to be fairly serious about photography and are also likely to know about slides. To cap the confusion, you can select images in Lightroom by clicking on the band or the image. That's not even consistent! You can select the image by clicking in the band, but you can't then drag what you've selected?
This is clearly one of those intuitive user interfaces that's only intuitive once you put in 10-20 hours meditating on the manual to memorize just how intuitive it all is. UI anti-metaphors like making users touch the slide images (but not the band) must be software koans put there to help enlighten us as to the true path of digital image editing. Rule number one - don't think of a slide. If you do, the master's staff will whack your next action into dev/null to keep your mind from straying off the path.
This reminds me of the time my mom went to the store looking for a product called "Top Shelf". She just couldn't find it and asked an employee for help. It took a while to locate. Why couldn't they find it easily? It was on the bottom shelf.
Next time: photo change history vs. session undo history
There's a basic feature in Lightroom called collections. Photos can be in multiple collections. Adding photos to a new collection is easy. Adding photos to an existing collection is unnecessarily confusing. First, there doesn't appear to be a menu option to do that. Second, the documentation (and at least one book) tell you to drag the photo from the grid view and drop it in the collection. Sounds simple enough, but every time I tried to do it, nothing happened. Why? To make a long story short, the images in the grid view have a band around them that makes them look like a slide (for any youngsters that may be reading this, slides are a pre-digital technology used to broadcast pictures onto walls). In Lightroom, you have to click (and drag) on the image and not the band around it to add it to a collection.
Anyone who has worked with slides knows that you handle them by the edge (unless you want to broadcast your fingerprint along with the image). People who use Lightroom are likely to be fairly serious about photography and are also likely to know about slides. To cap the confusion, you can select images in Lightroom by clicking on the band or the image. That's not even consistent! You can select the image by clicking in the band, but you can't then drag what you've selected?
This is clearly one of those intuitive user interfaces that's only intuitive once you put in 10-20 hours meditating on the manual to memorize just how intuitive it all is. UI anti-metaphors like making users touch the slide images (but not the band) must be software koans put there to help enlighten us as to the true path of digital image editing. Rule number one - don't think of a slide. If you do, the master's staff will whack your next action into dev/null to keep your mind from straying off the path.
This reminds me of the time my mom went to the store looking for a product called "Top Shelf". She just couldn't find it and asked an employee for help. It took a while to locate. Why couldn't they find it easily? It was on the bottom shelf.
Next time: photo change history vs. session undo history
