Curvemeister > Vote on and Discuss New Features

CM3 as an External App for Lightroom?

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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?

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.

curvemeister:
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.

curvemeister:
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 :-)

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