CM3 as an External App for Lightroom?

[Bulldoggie]

Any plans to update CM3 to operate as an external app in Lightroom 2.0?

If so, any idea when a beta might be available?

[imported_ganna]

I think the problem may be that LR is a database program. When you edit in LR you do not change the pixels as in PS, you write a text file which LR keeps and applies every time you open the image. That's why editing in LR is non destructive.
Yes, you can have CM as an external for LR, but only in the form of a plug in inside PS ;D
I use LR as well as PS  and I think the two goes hand in hand. I think you can only have CM as an external for LR if CM can operate on its own, independently of PS, which is not the case.
Only the 2c worth of a novice.

[-default]

To tell you the truth, I haven't looked at Lightroom in much detail.  As I understand it, LR does support 3rd party plug-ins, and I don't see any technical issues standing in the way.

The big problem is that I haven't finished off the 64 bit installer issues yet!

[skidoo]

For some ideas on how to make CM work with Lightroom, you may want to look at Topaz Labs' Fusion Express.  Maybe they would license it, or building something like this would be easier than full standalone.
Fusion looks like an external editor to LR, but does not work standalone.  LR exports a new tif to Fusion and Fusion hooks to one Topaz Photoshop Plug-ins.  You then edit image with only that one Topaz PS plug-in, making changes to the tif file and return it to LR when done.  Using Topaz's PS plug-ins this way, the changes don't go to LR database but are destructive edits to new tif, pretty much the way LR -> PS edits work.
To use a different Topaz PS plug-in, need to start another edit from LR and specify different plug-in when Fusion starts up.
Seem like they have made Fusion as lightweight as possible.  Maybe your CM PS plug-in needs features that can't be supported this way, but thought I would toss the idea in to the mix.

[-default]

Thanks, Skidoo.  I think this sums up the issue - CM would need to work destructively, and also support additional functionality that is now carried by Photoshop. 

Is this enough value added, or would it be better to do an LR curves module from scratch, perhaps picking up the Mac platform this time around?  Tough questions that our product marketing dept (me) will have to grapple with.  Only problem is that our marketing dept likes to write code rather than grapple with tough questions like these :-)

[mikemeister_admin]

Hi Mike,

I have a suggestion that would be very useful for CM users of LR.  LR can only provide very limited information about color in a photo.  In the develop module it can only provide (R,G,B) value for the point where the cursor is located.  As a CM user I regularly start up the CM standalone Hue Clock to decide if I need to make some adjustments the capabilities in LR or if I need to take the image into PS to use CM full capabilities.  I use this a lot to determine if the skin colors are reasonable and if they aren't how I should make the necessary adjustments...it also comes in handy for neutrals. 

Would it be possible to enhance the standalone clock to display the color values as in CM?  Having some quantitative information would certainly help me.  It would also be great if you could "pin" the point on the screen being measured.  The ability to have multiple clocks would be nice but isn't critical.

I don't know if these enhancements would be difficult...but I would find an enhanced hue clock would let me use some of my CM learnings using LR capabilities.

Thought this might be a useful suggestion to help CM users.

Gus

[skidoo]

Gus,
Thanks for the tip about standalone Hue Clock.  I looked on this site some and googled but didn't come up with a link for downloading it.
Mike,
Understand the desire to coding vs marketing, its the direction I would take.
I think to us LR users the destructive aspect of this solution on edit tifs would not be a showstopper.  As LR always keeps RAW image nondestructively and can be setup to keep other file type originals nondestructively.  LR is so weak in color space, we would be happy with what we can get. :-)  We already use LR with PS to get CM.

While it would be great to address Mac portablity and have a full LR plug-in, that seems like a huge effort.
Expect that addressing changes in PS and Windows releases, along with feature requests, you have a pretty full plate.
What I hear from LR plug-in developers, the state of its API is in flux, with the most stable being export plug-ins.  It does not seem that they have support for edit plug-in's yet.  Add to that using it's Lua prog language.  From that I was thinking a "true CM LR plugin" was a long way down the road, and maybe this PS plugin adapter would be a managable project.  But I understand that CM may need a lot of PS features that could make the PS adapter also a huge project.  It would be nice of Adobe to support PS plug-ins in LR, but have not seen that on the horizon.
If the demand for Mac is large there may be more weight for that direction.

Appreciate your efforts in bringing us CM, and good luck in your future directions with it.
I have only been using it a couple of weeks and it is a great tool, can't wait to learn more of it.

[-default]

Gus - these are good suggestions re the standalone hue clock.  I particularly favor the idea of being able to lock the hue clock to a particular point, and to have multiple points.

Re displaying numbers, Photoshop uses a relatively complex pipeline, involving a minimum of two profile conversions, to render colors, and the settings are not made externally available.  This means I would not be able to match the numeric values to the ones shown in Curvemeister.  I decided, rather boorishly, not to display numeric values at all in the hue clock.

I do plan to add some new features to the standalone hue clock for Curvemeister 4.

Mike

[-default]

Skidoo -

The PS plugin adapter idea is intriguing, and I'll take a look at what would be required for me to support it.

The idea of promoting multiple color spaces is even more intriguing.  I think you've also touched on some good points re the Mac platform.  For now, given the state of flux the LR API, this will have to stay an interesting idea.