Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Lightroom SDK opens up the development module

sooooo....Adobe opened up the Lightroom SDK to make adjustments in the develop module.

geek link: http://lightroomsolutions.com/sdk/modules/LrDevelopController.html

Lightroom always had a way to write "plugins" in an obscure language called LUA. Now for the first time in LR CC, these plugins can influence the slider settings in the develop module. To be clear: you can now write a native plugin that changes the sliders in the develop module. The friends over at Knobroom will use this it seems. this is cool. However, Paddy has traditionally taken a very different course (since this wasn't available before). What was a strength (it worked) now is a weakness (old tech). I also have no idea how LUA works.

I am sitting here, pondering the following:

1. This new interface doesn't allow everything, but can influence a lot of the sliders in the panels.
2. It's really cool and a sign for more to come
3. Communicating with this would require me to learn a bunch of new things, like how to send HTML requests to Lightroom, receive from Lightroom, and mostly, learn LUA
4. I have no inclination to learn LUA as it is super obscure and I am too old for this. I am not a programmer by trade (nor a professional photographer)
5. Maybe I can make the old tech work, maybe not. It will be a pain
6. Lots of work in my real job, and lots of family stuff
7. New cool products for professionals that use this start popping up (expensive but cool)

Right now, I am concluding that Paddy is not a priority for me. It is a pain in the behind and I am not moving to CC (yet?).

However, what we have is really cool. So, if somebody out there wants to learn how to use LUA, and write an HTML receiver/sender in LUA for this new Plugin module, I am happy to implement that in Paddy - I would in fact be delighted. Short of that, I will play with a few things going forward but not pushing as hard as I had previously. It's just not fun at the moment