slrlounge-lightroom-5-wish-list-1

Dear Adobe-Claus,

My name is Pye, and I am suffering from LCD-burn due to prolonged exposure in front of my computer’s monitor. You see, since the release of Lightroom 4, I have become addicted to Lightroom 4’s new Process 2012 features and functions. But, this addiction has cost me dearly over the past year. Previously, my fair Persian skin was a pleasantly light tan color. Since using Lightroom 4, my skin has darkened by roughly 4 shades of brown (or by approximately 1 full stop in camera terms) due to prolonged LCD exposure. The image below should provide conclusive evidence of this problem:

pyes-before-after-image

While Lightroom 4 offers a bountiful new feast of post production fruits, it has come at the cost of having to spend roughly 30-40% more time editing due to software efficiency issues. While this has meant that I haven’t been able to spend nearly as much time with my family, that really isn’t the true problem.

My darker complexion has lead to severe traumatic experiences over this past year. For starters, my wife is now over 9 shades lighter than me in skin complexion causing DSLRs to improperly expose our family photos. My darker complexion has also lead to nearly 6x more “intimately personal” pat downs at the Airport throughout the year. In fact, at this moment, just the thought of my Hawaii vacation is causing a paralyzing panic attack…

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Good now… Moving on. The biggest problem is in regards to my personal life. My child (who has a nice mix between fair Asian complexion and my original lightly tanned Persian complexion) now looks like he was born of an illegitimate relationship causing my wife and I much undue stress and embarrassment.

Adobe-Claus, my requests are simple. This year for Christmas, my Lightroom 5 wishlist consists of the following:

Improved CPU Utilization – Our latest Intel machines boast 4 cores and 8 threads of processing power. Lightroom 5 needs to be built to fully take advantage of next generation processors. In fact, it would be wonderful if we could have a preference slider that allows us to control the percentage of CPU power Lightroom 5 is allowed to use. During small/light processing tasks, we can keep the percentage low, while during large edits we can boost the slider to allow Lightroom 5 to use up more system resources.

Improved RAM Utilization – In many of our machines, we have 16, 32 and even 64GB of high performance memory installed. Yet, we haven’t seen a noticeable difference when compared to machines with only 8GB of RAM. Once again, it would be great to have a slider allowing us to control the amount of RAM Lightroom 5 has available. When producing portrait sessions, it would be amazing to have the entire shoot loaded into RAM.

Graphics Card Acceleration – I understand that Lightroom is a 2D application. Still, it seems that much of the processing tasks should be able to be handed off to a 3D graphics card, or even a 2D graphics card designed for CAD. Even if I had to purchase a $1,000 2D graphics card to get a significant boost in performance out of Lightroom, it would be well worth the money for a studio with our level of volume and throughput.

Adobe-Claus, in an effort to keep this letter short, I will conclude for now with these simple requests and follow up with more requests in Part II.

I would appreciate your efforts in directing the Adobe-Elves (or regular height folk) to address these issues.

Yours truly,

A severely distressed and traumatized Post Production Pye