The development of Adobe Lightroom, code named Shadowland, was not something Adobe started after Apple announced Aperture. The Shadowland project has been going on for years.
How do I know that Adobe has been working on Shadowland for so long?
Because that's how long I've been working on it.
Back in October of 2002 Mark Hamburg sent me a little developmental application he called PixelToy (breaking his own rule, there was an innercap) and jokingly referred to as "SchewePaint".
After leaving the Photoshop development team he worked on a concept application based upon painting with snapshots which used no layers. Mark had developed the History feature of Photoshop to more or less to suit me so he believed that I was uniquely suited to look at his new "toy".
Photo by George Jardine
The Original PixelToy Application
Shuffle
At the time, late 2002, Mark was in Adobe's Digital Media Lab under the direction of Greg Gilley working on experimental development primarily directed towards Mark's then increasing interest in digital photography.
Photo by Jeff Schewe
In December of 2002, Mark, UI designer Sandy Alves, project lead Andrei Herasimchuk and Thomas Knoll visited my studio for a couple of days of brainstorming product ideas directed towards photographers. During that meeting I expressed the importance of developing an application to deal with lots of images easily and efficiently instead of an application used for spending a great deal of time on a single image.
Shadowland is a musical reference to K.D. Lang's 1988 album Shadowland. Mark has a history of choosing code names based upon musical references.
The Greg Gorman Shoot
On one particular site visit to Greg Gorman's studio, Mark got a rather rude awakening—he personally had to deal with gigs of images that he shot. Greg, shooting with a Canon 1Ds, shot about 4 gigs of images during the course of the shoot day.
Dinner at Greg's
The Team Changes
Mark and the Shadowland crew made a lot of site visits to determine, on a task based system, those things photographers really needed. But the difficulties surrounding Shadowland persisted. Sandy left the team. Andrei got a bit fed up and left to start Involution Studios, his design firm.
Photo by Jeff Schewe
With the loss of Andrei, Mark didn't have a "product manager". Enter George Jardine. George was an ex-Adobe guy who had worked with Russell Preston Brown in the mid 1990's evangelizing Photoshop.
Photo by Douglas J. Martin
My UI Design Attempt
During a visit to Adobe I had dinner with Mark Hamburg. He was lamenting the fact that the UI needed a jumpstart. I shocked him by offering my services as the UI designer on Shadowland.
But ultimately he wanted somebody with a known track record and experience doing UI design in tough development situations. He turned to Phil Clevenger, formerly of MetaCreations.
The Final Push
During the PhotoPlus Expo in New York during October of 2005, Shadowland had a pretty up/down existence. The Aperture announcement caught a lot of attention in the photo community. However in many respects, Aperture actually helped save Lightroom. It gave the dev team and all of Adobe a target to shoot at—and the engineers at Adobe are nothing if not competitive.
So, here we are at the official announcement of Adobe Lightroom. Adobe chose to go an unusual route (for Adobe) and offer what is arguably a work-in-progress project up to the photographic community for review and comment.
Oh, one last thought, if you have some friends who just KNOW that Lightroom is just a knee-jerky reaction to Apple's Aperture, tell them to read this story. Applications take years to build...
Editor's Note: This story has been updated at 5:55 PM on 1/10/06 to correct several small errors.
Filed under: Lightroom, Photoshop News, PSN Editorials
53 Comments
"Oh, one last thought, if you have some friends who just KNOW that Lightroom is just a knee-jerky reaction to Apple's Aperture, tell them to read this story. Applications take years to build…"
So, Aperture must also have been in development for years, too!
How can this not be seen as a "knee-jerky" reaction to Aperture? When did Adobe last release a new product as a public beta a year ahead of availability?
Thanks for the historical perspective Jeff. And, I agree it is great to have two large companies focusing on the needs of us photographers!
Jeff is too modest. The inside name for some time was ScheweLand...
Ellis,
While I prolly had more to do with Lightroom than anybody else outside of Adobe, don't thank me, thank Mark Hamburg (and Thomas Knoll). They are the ones who see the direction that photographers need an app to go and do the heavy lifting and design and engineering. I just sit back and piss&moan...
:~)
Just for the record (and I say this in so many words in both articles) Lightroom and Aperture are both about the same age in dev years...read between the lines of what I wrote and you'll see that Lightroom had a tough time at Adobe finding a home—that's what retarded the development. But in no way is Lightroom a "reaction" to Aperture.
Even the Public Preview idea for Lightroom's first launch is over a year old—well before Adobe had an idea WHEN Aperture was to be released...
Thanks for Lightroom, Jeff.
Jeff,
How many hours in Lightroom did it take to make my hair look like that :) I do remember Jamie, Greg and I seeing a large meteor over downtown LA. I think after it passed something happened to my hair.
Best,
seth
A few minor corrections.
1) Sandy moved to outside the Lake Tahoe region of Sacramento. Not to New Mexico, which is where Taos is located.
2) I was officially Project Lead, not a product manager on the project.
3) While the final resulting UI is indeed very much the work of Phil, the order in which you have written the article seems to imply it was Phil's work all the way through, which is not the case. Phil was brought in after both Sandy and I left.
I look forward to using Lightroom to see how it all finally turned out.
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