Adobe Lightroom, Third and Final Round

My Lightroom comments continue to get a lot of attention, so we’ll continue the conversation one last time. First up, I want to point out that my dilemma isn’t that Lightroom doesn’t have a lot of features or performance. It’s soley my observation that I’m not sure that Adobe is doing enough to both satisfy existing users and attract new ones for me to continue to recommend it as the go-to choice. This centers on something I write about a lot: what user problem is being solved? For Lightroom, that originally was the late Jeff Schewe’s observation that now that serious photographers where taking many more photos, we needed a place to put them, organize them, and process them (when necessary). Lightroom’s genious was that it treated your ingested images as components in a database, but designed the database to operate in ways that would directly solve photographers’ key needs. The database itself was well hidden from the Lightroom user, but the benefits of the data-driven approach were…