DiscussionLightroom 'Prompt to Edit', has anyone actually got it yet?

Reading that Lightroom's getting a thing where you type what you want ("make the sky moodier, warm up the skin") and it does the edit for you. Not showing up on my version yet, unless Im blind, which is possible at 8am on the Northern line.

Honestly not sure how I feel. Half of me thinks great, the boring bits done for me. The other half thinks we're two updates away from typing "make this a good photo" and everyone's portfolio looking the same. Anyone tried it, and does it count as editing or is it something else?

OneMoreLens said:

make the sky moodier, warm up the skin

not on mine either. tbh "warm up the skin" is what the white balance slider is for, it's not exactly hard

Depends entirely on what it's doing under the hood, and nobody here seems to know yet.

If it's translating your sentence into slider moves and masks you can see and adjust afterwards, it's a slow interface for the same edit and I don't much care. Beginners will like it, the rest of us will ignore it after a week. If it's generating pixels that weren't captured, then it's not editing a photograph any more, it's illustration using a photograph as reference. That line matters to me, and I suspect it'll matter to competitions and picture editors too, which is why content credentials suddenly got interesting.

The thing that worries me isn't the feature, it's the default. Once "describe it and we'll do it" is the main way in, the house style of whoever trained the thing becomes everybody's style. We already went through that with presets, and every Instagram feed in 2016 had the same teal shadows.

Nobody is ever going to type "make this a good photo" and get one, by the way. Taste doesn't come in a text box.

rawtherapist said:

If it's translating your sentence into slider moves and masks you can see and adjust afterwards

Thats my understanding of how its meant to work, but I havent seen it so who knows. The teal shadows thing gave me flashbacks honestly

If it is sliders, it is a macro with voice. Useful for beginners who don't know what "dehaze" does. I already know which slider I want, so for me it would be slower, I can move three sliders before I finish typing the sentence. The interesting question is what it does when the instruction is vague, like "make it more dramatic". Every person means something different with that.

dmitri_k said:

it is a macro with voice

A macro with voice that you pay for monthly and that phones home every time you ask it something... I'll stick to dragging sliders like a caveman. Just saying.

This is why I nail it in camera! Nobody has to prompt anything if the recipe's right. You pick the look before you leave the house and then you just take photos. Half joking. Mostly not joking.

Acros said:

Nobody has to prompt anything if the recipe's right

a recipe is a prompt you set once in a menu, change my mind

...okay that's annoyingly fair

rawtherapist said:

Beginners will like it, the rest of us will ignore it after a week.

I don't think it's only beginners. From the business side, if this speeds up a bulk edit on 300 headshots I'll use it tomorrow and not think about it. "Even out the skin, match the background across the set, keep the tie color right" is a real request I get, and right now it's an hour of tedious work per batch, plus a second pass when someone in the set is wearing something odd.

Clients aren't going to ask whether I moved the slider or a sentence did. They ask whether the files are back by Friday and whether they look like themselves on a good day. If a sentence gets me there faster, the sentence wins.

Where it gets messy is anything that ends up as news, evidence, or a competition entry, where what was in front of the lens matters more than what looks good. That's not my world, and I'd expect those people to set their own rules about it, which I think they already are.

cdalton_photo said:

Clients aren't going to ask whether I moved the slider or a sentence did.

Right up until a client's face looks slightly not like their face. Then they will.

Going to be the boring one and say that if your photo needs a paragraph of instructions to fix, the problem happened before you got home. Go out and shoot it better. I'm not against the tools, I use masks and denoise like everyone else. But every year the software promises to fix a bit more of what we got wrong in the field, and every year people seem to take a bit less care in the field. Cheers

darkslide said:

Go out and shoot it better.

If it's sliders it's pointless for anyone who knows the sliders. If it isn't, it isn't photography. Not that interested either way.