Lightroom 2.0 Does Plugins Right?
Posted April 4th, 2008 @ 02:16pm by Erik J. Barzeski
Lightroom 2.0's beta adds, like Aperture 2.0, the ability to have plugins. Unlike Aperture, Lightroom manages to allow plugins to edit data non-destructively ((This may or may not be true. I've read later reports that say Lightroom's plugin architecture is much weaker than Apple's, and that some plugins may have to act the same way as Apple's. It's just that the included dodge/burn - very similar to Apple's "sample" plugin - behaves differently. We'll have to wait to see how "non-destructive" Lightroom's plugins really are.)).
I've been railing on Apple's rather crappy "plugin support" since it became obvious it was not a non-destructive ((I think "non-destructive" isn't the best term. How about "non-duplicative" or "doesn't make a bunch of extra files for each frickin' plugin"?)) process. Why Apple thinks managing a bunch of TIFFs or PSDs is acceptable is beyond me.
I plan on reading this comparison later today.
Donate Life
Posted 04 Apr 2008 at 11:21pm #
❓ Do you have a reference for the idea that the Lightroom 2.0 beta has _any_ editing plugin support? I can't find anything.
From the look of it Lightroom only has the built-in selective editing tools and there will be no support for editing plugins at all.
Aperture's system seems much better suited to 3rd party plugins... it lets them work on a known image format, render their changes (which could be a very slow process) and then reimport them into Aperture. If Lightroom tries to do non-destructive plugin support then things like NoiseNinja will cause an image to take over a minute to render whenever you make an adjustment?
Posted 06 Apr 2008 at 3:19pm #
a couple of things;
as Nick T points out, references to the existence of a plugin architecture in LR2 are hard to find.
that said, i remember when LR1 was in beta the adobe dev's were mentioning that they had a LR SDK planned, and that budding developers should learn the 'Lua' programming language as the interface of LR is written using it.
with regard to Aperture's plugins the review of Ap2.1 on Rob Galbraith's site suggests that it IS possible for plugins to work directly on the RAW data ... just the dodge and burn plugin doesn't. :/
IMHO neither app has this problem nailed: Aperture's system in convoluted, LR's is painfully slow, and neither address the fact that when working in the darkroom (in days of old) you didn't dodge and burn with a paint brush!