Adobe’s Lightroom has been critical for many photographers’ post-processing needs. The software offers great presets, allows one to edit large chunks of images with ease, and has a user-friendly menu and interface. However, there have been instances when one’s Lightroom catalog has died, leaving many photographers in immense distress. What does it mean? They lose out on all the presets they created for their images. While many are still going the long, arduous way to recreate their preset, a user on Reddit has created a free tool to restore the catalog with ease. How? Here’s a look at it.
On r/photography, user u/iusemydogshampoo posted their experience with his Lightroom catalog crashing. “My Lightroom catalog completely died last month. Corrupted beyond repair. Tried everything: repair tool, backups, recovery software. Nothing worked,” the user wrote. However, while looking for solutions online, none seemed easy, fast or had a good interface with which to work. So, despite an upcoming deadline, the user chose to create a simple tool that can “extract the Lightroom data” from their “exported JPGs.”
Titled Colorsuit.app, this is a separate website that opens on your browser, and one that can directly run on a computer. How does it work? It is pretty straightforward. “Just drag any JPG that contains Lightroom data, and it extracts,” the user wrote. Some of its features include:
- The XMP data (one can download it for Lightroom)
- LUTs for videos
- Camera settings
In addition, the landing page of the website also has “before and after” examples that allow one to see the color grading details. This way, you can figure how different post-processing impacts a RAW file.
The best part is that this tool is free of cost. You do not have to sign up; no need to pay through your pockets or have a seven-day trial. “It’s free and always will be,” the creator says. In addition, u/iusemydogshampoo is also open to help you further if you meet with a challenge during your use of the website.
The interface is simple and clean, while the overall effort has been widely appreciated by users on Reddit. “This is so unbelievably good. fast, clear, easy, great UX – does what it says on the tin,” said one user. “I cannot express with words how happy I am that you exist. The hero we need!” another chimed in.
However, the entire post further highlights how we need companies like Adobe to set up and offer more solutions to their customers. It should not be the job of consumers to create tech despite them paying rising subscription fees to access software for their work. Furthermore, if you are unable to find or restore files, then you might as well simply charge a small subscription fee. Creating software that is unable to recover existing presets only proves how billion-dollar empires are unable to assess their own products and their flaws.
This is also why the Phoblographer team has switched to Capture One, which is far more efficient and has no hidden fees in the subscription plans. If only companies did better than focusing on monopoly, we might soon find ourselves in a Utopian world.
