As I mentioned in my last post on Adobe’s Photography Creative Cloud announcement, at Photoshop World last week Adobe Product Manager Tom Hogarty demonstrated Lightroom Mobile, an exciting solution now in development that will allow us to seamlessly review and make at least basic adjustments to photos in our Desktop Lightroom catalogs using our iPads or iPhones.
This is a component of the future direction of Lightroom that Tom articulated, moving from being just “your Desktop photography solution, to being your (complete) photography solution”.
Lightroom Mobile is still very much in development, but Tom demonstrated in Lightroom on his main computer:
- Putting a checkmark next to collections that he wanted Lightroom to sync to his iPad
- Logging into his Adobe account from within Lightroom
- Turning on a “Lightroom Sync” switch.
This was all it took for Lightroom to upload photo smart previews and a small Lightroom catalog up to the Cloud, and down to his iPad.
Then in Lightroom Mobile on his iPad, Tom showed:
- That photos automatically appeared – with their develop work (and presumably keywords and other metadata).
- Reviewing and rating photos in Grid and Loupe View
- Applying Basic Panel develop adjustments
- Uploading photos to a web gallery and to Behance.net.
Tom then jumped back to Lightroom on his main computer, and the work he had done on his iPad was there, with no further instructions to Lightroom needed!
Who knows how much functionality will ultimately be built into Lightroom Mobile (or whatever it is ultimately called). The really impressive thing so far is how seamlessly and intuitively it works.
As Tom indicated, many of us would still want to do serious development work on our computers with our calibrated monitors, but I am waiting eagerly for the day when I can review a shoot while I’m sitting on the couch or waiting for an appointment (or on a train or on a plane, as Tom pointed out), do basic adjustments, and have that work show up back on my main computer!
This demonstration was paired with the announcement that owners of Photoshop CS3 or newer can subscribe to a special “Photography Creative Cloud” for just $9.99/month. This gives us always-up-to-date Lightroom and Photoshop, as well as 20 GB of cloud storage (which is presumably what will facilitate the sync to Lightroom Mobile.) This Creative Cloud offer will be available the week of September 16. next week – stay tuned to this blog for more details as they become available.
[sc:signup]Below is the Keynote Address from Photoshop World. Tom Hogarty speaks from 33:08 to 46:12.
I like the whole concept as long as it’s not a subscription based system which I will never pay for. The Lightroom-photoshop bundle will start out at 9.95 a month but just like my cable bill and everything else that you pay for by the month will slowly creep up to 50$ a month and beyond.
mike c
They don’t mention that the TAX is NOT included !!
Åke
I was told that we had to pay tax for Photoshop CC even though our account is tax exempt. They said they would refund the tax quarterly or annually, but we had to call to get the refund. I can’t believe that. Don’t they have enough to do at Adobe. Just think of the bookkeeping, refunding etc. on this. Sounds like something our federal government is running.
So all of this technology, capability, flexability and power is not worth 33 cents a day to you?
As expensive as digital photography is this seems like a trivial amount to me.
jack
It is to me, Jack! :-)
What will happen to apps like “Photosmith”?
I’m hoping that having competition makes all the products better, Luis!
Why in the world would you want to use this on an iPhone which has such a small screen? And why no android version? Would be useful on my Galaxy Note 2 or my wife’s Note 8. Make it as an Android app Adobe, and I’ll buy it at the same price as the Photoshop Touch.
Who said there will be no Android version? Stop complaining long before the product is even announced as a product. What was shown was just a developer preview.
Why would you want to do this on an Android. The OS is so bulky it most likely can’t handle the work load. Plus have you check their colour coverage of Samsung screens prior to S4 and Note 3?? Absolutely crap. All the vibrant colour on the screen is fake as it covers MORE than SRGB.
Seriously when it comes to photography, don’t border with Android.
Am I missing a something, or will this not be a fantastic result for keeping a catalog synced between a laptop and desktop… providing they release an OSX version (not just iOS)? Please don’t tell me there’s already a Lightroom based way (ie not thru 3rd party cloud sync software) to do that and I’ve missed it..
I would hope that’s where they are going, Jeremy! An alternative right now is to store your catalog in Dropbox, but you have to be very careful not to open it from both computers at once, or you will surely corrupt it.
Of course, for immediate use on the iPad, you can use Photosmith App (www.photosmithapp.com). No, I don’t work on this app, but I’ve been using it to help me manage a weekly event shoot that has a 2-day turnaround. Culling, keywords, other stuff I can’t do without being in front of Lightroom can be handled quite nicely by this app.
Its Lightroom sync works very well, The FTP/iTunes image imports still have some kinks, but the LR sync is pretty quick, over WiFi. The app does crash some while culling through a 1000-image set of images, but it remembers where it was prior to the crash, so it’s tolerable. And it beats trying to get the event culled and edited in a really short time that I can be actually at the computer, because most of the time I’m out-n-about.
I use this on an iPad 2.
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