Also they are going to show off some of the features at Photoshop World during tommorow’s keynote.

You can sign up to see the annoucement here.

Adobe is taking a page from the Lightroom specialization playbook for Photoshop by trying to make it more customizable to specific users and tasks. But in contrast with Lightroom, company is trying to do so without sacrificing the software’s general-purpose nature, said John Nack, [principal] product manager for Photoshop.

“We want to make it possible to be everything you want and nothing you don’t,” Nack said. “One of the tough things has been dealing with the enormous breadth of Photoshop. We end up presenting same interface to architects as we do to Web designers as radiologists as prepress folks.”

To achieve that goal, Photoshop’s interface will become more open-ended and even programmable, he said.

“You’ll see some of the things we’ve learned about Lightroom–making things browsable and less modal–come into Photoshop,” Nack said. In other words, it’ll be easier to shift Photoshop from one task to another.

With a “Configurator” application that should be released by Adobe Labs within a month or two of release the next version of Photoshop, Adobe will let users create and share their own Photoshop control panels written in Adobe’s Flash programming language, Nack added. “Our goal is to make it possible for expert users to reconfigure the environment on a task-by-task basis and share those workspaces with other people. You don’t have to write code. You can knock together an interface and make it sharable.”

Check out the post here.

I really like the idea for a Camera Raw Palette.

This one is simple in nature but very likely extremely difficult in implementation. Doesn’t mean I can’t dream though. See, if I work on a raw photo, I’d like to not go back out to another dialog to adjust something in the raw settings. I’d love to have a little palette or dialog right there in Photoshop that I can adjust and have my image update. I realize this is totally crazy and defies the laws of everything raw but you never know what those Adobe engineers can pull off. They’re some of the best in the world and if anyone can do it I bet they can. Think about this… 5 years ago, did you ever think you’d be able to do non-destructive retouching and selective edits on a raw file? Probably not, but if you take a look at Lightroom 2 beta you’ll see it’s happening today.

I have at least 4 computers running on a network that need to access all of my adjustments at any time. The current system of having to import the images into Lightroom on each computer almost unusable. I hate having to remember which computer I was editing the files I want on. This system may work fine if you are the photographer, editor, retoucher, and printer. But if you have different people to do some of those jobs, like most true photography studios, the current system needs reworking.

Network support was on the top of Scott Kelby’s Lightroom 2.0 wishlist, which adobe showed at photoshop world. So they know that we are screaming for this. Just look at this post on the beta 2 forums.

The problem with network support is the fact that they are using SQLLite for the database engine behind Lightroom. SQLLite does not support networks or even the abilty to store the database on a network share. This was just a very bad choice by Adobe. Why would you use something that would so greatly limit a product that was supposed to be the next leap in editing.

Even if they could keep SQLLite for most users and allow the power users to setup their own database server it would help things a lot. I understand the support problems with a client-server database, but there are many ways that they could make it easy to setup. For instance they could create their own database server and call it Lightroom server that way users would not have to deal with setting up their own server like mysql or mssql.

I posted about maybe installing our own server like mysql and dtull of adobe replied the following.

“Actually there are variations in SQL amongst the various databases, though Lightroom probably does do a lot of SQL that wouldn’t be portable to other databases. However, the performance characteristics of embedded databases versus those which operate via a network service are dramatically different and the DB/App coupling is actually quite different as well, so it’s not as easy as just pointing LR at a “real” RDBMS and having things “just work”. On top of that, the testing impact of supporting all the various DBs and configurations would be quite significant.”

I also asked if we can’t have true multiuser network support then why not allow us to store the Lightroom cataloge on a network share. dtull replyed.

“none of the databases I’ve used (and that’s quite a few) will operate reliably if their data files are on a network share (though many of them do run with their data on a storage area network, but that’s a whole different ballgame from your typical consumer file share) . The difference is that most DBs run on a big server machine and talk to their clients via a network protocol, so working with multiple clients is easy to handle. Those kinds of systems involve more setup and configuration, though, and are actually slower in the local access, single client scenario because the communication channel is lower bandwidth and higher latency than in process communication.

All that said, this is something we’ve talked about internally (that is, we’re not completely ignoring the request), but finding the right balance amongst the pros and cons of the different options is more than a little tricky.”

They have at least tested out the abilty to store over a network as he says the catalog becomes corrupted.

“I did actually add a switch (briefly) to allow support of a catalog file on a network share (basically just lifting the block on it) and managed to corrupt the catalog beyond repair (and if you Google around for my name, you’ll find I know a few things about repairing catalogs) when testing it under stress conditions. SQLite is fundamentally dependent on sound file locking guarantees to ensure data integrity and network file shares don’t cut it.

So, while it would be (was) be easy to “just allow it” for power users, I’d basically be committing myself to spending all my time helping people whose catalogs were damaged when their network hiccuped at the wrong moment.

Which unfortunately means a robust catalog on a network share feature is much harder and more risky than it seems on the surface without even getting into the multiple simultaneous users aspect.”

When asked about Mulituser/Network support in 2.0 dtull replied, “just that it isn’t there in 2.0 and isn’t as easy to do properly as some people indicate”

So it seems like Adobe has no intention of correcting their mistakes with a choice of database in Lightroom 2. Maybe we can hope that they will listen to thier customers when they start coding Lightroom 2.5 or 3.

If you want to voice your oppion on network support please reply to this thread on the Lightroom Beta 2 forums.

1. Identity Plate as Logo on images

Every image that I print in my studio has my logo on it. It does not go out the door without one. To me the printing in Lightroom is nice for personal stuff but it is too hard to put on a logo for production work.

The Identity Plate could easily be adapted to put a logo on the image. All we need is to check render on every image. The problem is that this puts in in the center of each image.

We also need a setting to choose a anchor for the plate. The choices would be the 4 corners and the center. This location needs to be based off the rotation of the image not the cell. So if choice the bottom right the logo would always be in the bottom right of the image every if the image was rotated on the paper.

Now we need to scale the logo to the print. The easiest way to do this is to add another slider to size the logo based on the size of the printed image. The slider would need to go from 1% to 100%. So if you set it to 8% the size of the logo would be 8% of the printed image size. The best way to calculate this is to use the longest side of the printed image and the longest side of the logo. This way The logo would be the same size on a vertical 8×10 as it would on a horizontal 8×10.

2. Filename and other metadata on package

Filename and other metadata needs to be able to be printed on the package page. This needs to be a small area that you can move to different areas of the layout like the identity plate. We need to be able to choose what information we want and the size of the font.

3. Custom Print Sizes when printing to file

We need to be able to enter the dimensions in inchs and it convert it by the number used for file resolution. I am trying to print on a 7in x 20in file at 254 dpi. I have to calculate this out manually and the whole process is nothing like the normal print dialog.

To me the best thing to do would be to remove the print setting and the page setup buttons and make a new page setup just for print to file. That way you could have more of the same interface that you do when printing to a printer.

4. Output File Naming

Need the ability to setup the output file naming when printing to file. I don;t want to have to choose the location and type in a name for every image that I print. This needs to be setup exactly like the export file naming with the tokens, metadata and custom text to name the file. We also need a token for the name of the saved template you are printing and the location of the output files needs to be stored in the template.

5. Output to Tiff

Sometimes we need to output to something other than jpg, mot much but sometimes.

6. More than one image on package

I know this one is the hardest to make happen, but If we could have the ability to place multiple image on a layout it could open up the options that the picture package could be used for.

7. Custom Layout mode

Along the same lines as the multiple images. It would be great if we could layout a page however we like. Use as many images as we want and custom sizes for each. Also each cell would need controls like fit and zoom for it and not globally. Other controls like opacity and applying develop presets to the cells would allow you to use lightroom for many things like album layout, composites and custom products. Lightroom has all this built in we just need access to the setting to do it.

I know this would take some time, but it is the type thing that would be great if we had a full sdk so we could make or own modules.

Looks neat, its very easy to quickly edit images and snapshots. I just started playing with it seems very quick and easy to use. But it is far from the real Photoshop CS3.