Comments on: Oh goody: Neutral density filter for Lightroom

One feature I'd really like, the equivalent of a neutral density filter to better handle scenes with bright and dim patches, appears headed for Lightroom.

[Baylink]

Henh?

> "Another favorite feature I'd like to see as an amateur nature photographer is a neutral density filter," he said. "We are listening to the market. We're figuring out what they need and what we can achieve from a technical perspective in keeping with the nondestructive philosophy."

That sounds to me like the quote of someone who either a) doesn't know what he's talking about, or b) is OCD.

Split ND's are trivial; Picasa, for ghod's sake, has one built in. Implementing it for Lightroom would be more than 2 hours work... why?

You have to regression test it?

[Galaxy5]

This is already easy to do in Photoshop...

...and the same technique can be applied in far more flexible ways.
Take a Charlie Cramer/Bill Atkinson workshop and they'll show you
how.

The folks at Apple had better add local controls to Aperture.
Lightroom already has a large share of the market for integrated
editing and management apps.

[Shankland]

yes, but Lightroom != Photoshop

Sure, Photoshop and any number of other mainstream editors have abundant ways to select bits of images, including just the sky above a horizon line, and change exposure or other parameters. But Photoshop is a different tool than Lightroom--more of a general-purpose image editor and less of a package for nondestructively editing raw image files. So I do think a neutral density filter in Lightroom is indeed a noteworthy development.

Local controls are a rarity in Lightroom, but that looks to be changing at least to some degree in the future. Adobe no doubt wrestles daily with how much Photoshop to build into Lightroom--layers, smart objects, and compositing seem unlikely candidates to me, but I could definitely see the addition of better noise reduction, sharpening, and perhaps high-dynamic range image creation. Panorama stitching? Hmm...