Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom Question Popup

Anyone who uses Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop CC is probably familiar with the occasional popup when you launch the program asking you how satisfied you are with the program and how likely are you to recommend it to a friend.

Then it asks you what Adobe could do to make the program better.

I think they are pretty good programs. I would recommend them to a friend and have. I think they need to add more lines for a response. I would like to see LR move the right menu close button because I keep accidentally closing the menu while editing. ;-) It would be nice to just buy the software instead of renting but I have resided myself to the fact that that probably is not going to happen. So I moved past it.

Setting up the new online web pages is a bit nebulous and one day when I have time to learn it, I may actually try to figure that out.

As far as using the software on a computer, I am pretty happy with the software. The tablet version of LR works but is a bit less intuitive so I muddle through with it when I travel and just need to make some light edits, but save the serious post editing for my computer.

What are your thoughts on the software and changes/improvements do you ask for if any?

This is my current wish-list for Lightroom (suggestions either already sent or waiting for the next opportunity to be sent):

1. If there were a way to temporarily change the color of the adjustment brush/clone/graduated filter pins or make them flash, I’d have a lot easier time finding them on images I’m re-editing, since their gray color is often well-camouflaged against the background.
   
2. It’d be really convenient if I could click on a cropped photo in Library mode to temporarily see the full uncropped image (I’m jumping back and forth a lot between Library and Develop in order to assess the extent of crops).
   
3. I’d love it if I could enlarge the tone curve graph when needed so I could control it more precisely.
   
4. I’d get a lot of use out of a keyboard shortcut to show all photos in Library mode.
   
5. An option to stretch or squish an image to adjust aspect without cropping would be a very useful addition to the Transform panel.
   
6. I would very much like to be able to crop while zoomed in.
   

And if anyone here knows of ways to accomplish these, please let me know!

If there were a way to temporarily change the color of the adjustment brush/clone/graduated filter pins or make them flash, I’d have a lot easier time finding them on images I’m re-editing, since their gray color is often well-camouflaged against the background.

Yes, there is a way, press the O key. And all areas that the selected adjustment brush touched will highlight to a color of your choosing. Press O again to turn off highlight and see the results of your edit.

Yes, there is a way

Thanks, Mark. That works great if I've already found the pin and selected it. My problem is that I sometimes can't find the pins to select them, since they may be the same color as what's behind them. What I'd like to be able to do is easily see at a glance where the pins are on an image--imagine all the pins flashing in neon green, for example.

An option to stretch or squish an image to adjust aspect without cropping would be a very useful addition to the Transform panel.

I am not sure why you would want to squish the image in changing aspect ratio, but that is a little outside Lightroom's scope. This can be easily done in Paint Shop Pro and you can set up Lightroom to easily send the photo you are working on to an external editor like Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. I send mine as TIFF, make my edits, save and when I return to Lightroom I will see a new version of my edited photo as a new photo, the original remains intact also.

That works great if I've already found the pin and selected it. My problem is that I sometimes can't find the pins to select them, since they may be the same color

Now I understand. That would be a nice addition to LR that would be helpful, Leslie.

This can be easily done in Paint Shop Pro

What I usually do is export to Affinity or Photoshop and do the transform there, but that means that I end up with a psd or tiff; I'd much prefer to keep the image in raw as long as possible. Often that's the only non-LR edit I need to make, and I end up spending 5 minutes on it instead of the 5 sec it would have required in LR. Since this would be a parametric edit rather than a pixel-based one, it'd be well within the scope of LR's capabilities. As to the "why"--that's a good question; it's not something that a lot of people would ever need to do. In my case, I often work with images that don't have inherent dimensional clues (abstract forms, for example)--whether the image is stretched or not really doesn't matter to the interpretation of the content, but it can make a huge difference to the composition.

There is a way to set up multiple external editors--I've got mine set for PS, Affinity, and each of the Nik programs. How to do it wasn't obvious, though. I went to Preferences-->External editing, then kept adding new ones via "additional external editor." The second time I did it, I thought I was replacing the first additional one I'd added, but it didn't, so I kept adding more. They all now show up in the drop-down menu under "Edit in..." and I can choose whichever one I want.

There is a way to set up multiple external editors--I've got mine set for PS, Affinity, and each of the Nik programs. How to do it wasn't obvious, though. I went to Preferences-->External editing, then kept adding new ones via "additional external editor." The second time I did it, I thought I was replacing the first additional one I'd added, but it didn't, so I kept adding more. They all now show up in the drop-down menu under "Edit in..." and I can choose whichever one I want.

Thank you for that, Leslie. I just added a couple more. I just had to save the current setting as a preset in the drop down.