Noise NJ Plugin and Lightroom

[woodda]

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Anybody know it NJ is going to do a plug in for Lightroom. Thanks inadvance

[spylaw4]

No - but it would be useful - email them perhaps?

 

5 minutes later - email sent!

[ericperlberg]

Lightroom doesn't have a plug-in architecture except for plugins for final output from Lightroom, There isn't an SDK for 3rd party plugin developers working on process plugins like Noise Ninja AFAIK so it isn't possible for anyone to write photoshop like plugins for LR. I think the reasons why are obvious. Adobe does not want to cannibalise their photoshop sales. I call it the Photoshop Tax on Lightroom.

 

The recent development of a robust plug in architecture for Aperture has been ridiculed by some Lightroom support boffins (Jeff Schewe, Andrew Rodney, Ian Lyons all come to mind) because it (Aperture's approach) generates tiff files and takes one out of the native RAW workflow which is true enough but the tradeoff is that in Lightroom you only get those tools that Adobe chooses to add while in Aperture you will see a growing number of powerful photographic tools incorporated right inside an Aperture workflow.

 

As I said recently on the Lightroom 2.0 beta forum at Adobe, I wonder if Apple owned Photoshop would Adobe make available an SDK for Lightroom plugins. I suspect the answer is yes, even if it involved the dreaded Tiff file technique.

 

I suspect we will soon see Aperture plugins handling localised masked sharpening, noise reduction, colour manipulation, contrast, saturation, b/w conversions including grain simulations and others mimicking all the popular photoshop plugins.

 

Lightroom is a great tool and I own it and use it and I own and use CS3. I don't own Aperture. But for most photographers who don't need Photoshop for graphic design or scientific purposes, Aperture will be an ambitious and cost saving competitor (almost £500/$1000 cheaper based on UK pricing) to the Adobe 2 product strategy. At least if you work on a Mac.

 

And it will be interesting to see what Bibble comes up with also.