One Horse wrote:

 

I guess they didn't get enough negative feedback. I really hate it.

That boat has sailed...

I guess it may be a matter of preference - or I wonder if those that find the interface difficult to read have calibrated/profiled monitors?  Obviously the brightness especially of greys will depend on the tone response (gamma curve) of the monitor.  On my monitors the grey fonts aren't dark, but quite light - with highlighted text white.  I've had no issue of legibility on any size monitor with any of the text. 

Just a thought: check screen gamma and overall brightness level. 

One Horse wrote:

 

not easy to see or use.

Perfectly readable on my calibrated monitor...

I love the UI and I'm hypercritical of UIs. Text is fine here on a NEC 22" Spectraview. Lightroom has to accomodate a lot of info, and it's a pretty brilliant job. It runs amazingly well given all it's doing

The things that bother me are lack of time-saving shortcuts for certain things, like no hotkey to cycle through the profiles in develop (when testing to see if camera standard, adobe standard, etc. is the best fit for an image. This is a huge waste of time when processing a shoot. The active area for slider arrows should be a bit bigger too. Overall LR interace and usability gets an 80 or 85/100 from me, with something like Sony Vegas getting a 95% (the most brilliantly designed software ever IMO) and Adobe Premiere at 10% (only program in existence worse is Blender!)

no offense but maybe you should visit an eye specialist instead of squinting.

as i said i have an calibrated eizo i work on with LR... but then i have 3 other systems including a laptop with cheap monitors and i just tried them.

i have no problems at all. even the laptop is fine.

mwillems wrote:

 

Personally, I would like to see much more difference between "selected as part of multiple selected images" and the only slightly lighter "selected as the active image".

That a different issue than the UI being dark (one that I happen to agree with). It's a problem when the film strip is pretty small for me, not so much a problem when in Library. Feel free to add a Lightroom Freature Request.

I'll side with the OP here. Too often Lightroom's shades of grey on dark grey are a victory of design subtlety over usability (eg disclosure triangles, warning colours on drives, rgb curves). It would be good to offer a higher contrast setting - call it "100W lights on"?

johnbeardy wrote:

 

I'll side with the OP here. Too often Lightroom's shades of grey on dark grey are a victory of design subtlety over usability (eg disclosure triangles, warning colours on drives, rgb curves). It would be good to offer a higher contrast setting - call it "100W lights on"?

But that's still just a personal opinion, John - it's not indicative of a problem per se if as many (more?) of us are happy with the colours of the UI.

Like Simon, they stand out nicely on my screen, without being overbearing - and these are 51 year old eyes.

The reason I keep banging on asking whether people have calibrated and profiled monitors: to get the best out of Lightroom you really do need to use colour-management, with a calibrated and profiled monitor. 

If the people unhelpfully pointing out "it works for me" all have calibrated and profiled monitors then that might be saying something, well, helpful!

As one of the "it's okay on my machine..." people, I would add that as the UI is always an area of personal preferences (tastes?), it would surely make sense - from a customer satisafaction point of view - to have some ability of software to have colour choices available to the user. Yes, I know that some coding/testing time would be taken, but it is (as John B noted above) not unknown for coding time to be taken on less than essential cosmetic stuff.

Anthony.

CSS Simon wrote:

 

If the people unhelpfully pointing out "it works for me" all have calibrated and profiled monitors then that might be saying something, well, helpful!

-Agfacklack- wrote:

as i said i have an calibrated eizo i work on with LR... but then i have 3 other systems including a laptop with cheap monitors and i just tried them.

i have no problems at all. even the laptop is fine.

 

 

i really don´t see a problem with the readability on my systems.

if someone likes the dark UI it or not.. ok that is a matter of personal taste.

but from an ergonomic viewpoint .. i can´t understand the complains.

but i agree, it should be no problem to make the UI configurable.
a slider light gray <-> dark gray and a slider for text brightness should be easy to implement.

johnbeardy wrote:

 

... as in too many aspects of Lightroom, we get used to sub-par features, don't you think?

Yes, John, I think so, too !

...even if i am still grumbling once in a while...

Cornelia

I happen to have a very large and calibrated top-of-the-line NEC display so that is not the issue — although it's brightness is set for accurate Color Proofing for Print.

I simply find the LR GUI a dark, cluttered and depressing environment in which to work (and an eye-straining one too!) and much prefer to work in the broad sunny uplands of Photoshop and Bridge-hosted ACR. (And that combination works extremely efficiently even for this photographer who may return from a Shoot with anywhere between four and eight thousand photographs!)

The ability to choose a lighter interface is essential in my case.

Panels which retracted into docks on the edges of the monitor would get rid of the clutter and provide a bigger working space and then the "develop" panels could open more widely when in use to allow for wider sliders.

Another thing about dark interfaces is that while they may be satisfactory for those who only prepare work for on-screen viewing, they are thoroughly unsuitable for those who prepare work for the Press or Printing in general.

Yet again, I have given another new version of LR (LR4) a fair testing and regret that, for the reasons stated here,  I still do not find it to be a program that I will be buying.

"Panels which retracted into docks on the edges of the monitor would get rid of the clutter and provide a bigger working space and then the "develop" panels could open more widely when in use to allow for wider sliders...."

As already pointed out -- they do.

But there is lots more, if you spend the time to look ...

• Each side panel can be to solo mode so only one section opens at a time
• The toolbar at the bottom can be turned on and off (not the panel -- the film-strip, the toolbar is above that), and it can be configured as to what it contains
• You can leave each panel the way you want it and it (usually) comes back that way for each of the modules
• The module selection button/words, top right can be configured, as can their size and font
• You can customize the title (upper-left) for each catalog, which I do since I have 5 catalogs

Yes, might be nice to configure the colours but for me I like it the way it is -- obviously others do not

I would NEVER print from LR!

There is a lot more to to do in professional image-making than merely colour correcting in LR!

I think that LR is probably perfectly fine for amateur photographers and hobbyists but it cannot, and does not, provide the full range of tools that a professional graphic arts person needs. If you are going to buy Photoshop and the rest of the Creative Suite (which is what I do) I find that LR is superfluous to my needs.

For example, when I make Blurb books, I use a CMYK Photohop/InDesign/Acrobat Pro workflow and would never use Blurb's sRGB BookSmart workflow (which is basically what LR4 provides).

It has been interesting to try out the latest version of LR4, and to see the latest gizmos which have been added to it, but I have seen enough to realise that I will NOT be purchasing it when my 30-day trial period ends.

Seems to me that a couple of people here just don't want to like LRx.

They don't know what it can do and have not really looked at it to see what it can do,

I for one will stop posting responses.

Its one thing to say you don't like it, but don't blame it for not having things it does have,

and don't complain about it if you have not spent a few days looking at it, you cannot

know if you spent 10min looking at it.