Lightroom 2.0 will not export to Photoshop CS3

Just to be clear I am
b not
an Adobe employee and am a user of Lr like most of us on this forum.

I agree Bob. I have had several photography friends ask whether I think they should buy LR2, and I have said - 'It's great, but hold off until they sort themselves out'. Meanwhile they are trialing versions of the competitions software, and may end up sticking with them. LR2 is fabulous, but people are busy and don't have time to muck around - esp if they are treated with disdain by the company. Brand loyalty is bought with respect for the customer as much if not more than good products (esp when there are some other great products on the market). If Adobe realised that their future required investing as much in that as in software development and buying out the competition, their future would be far more sure.

Julian, well stated and to the point.
Dear Julian,

The crux of the matter seems to be that Kevin feels he has been communicating. In Kevin's and Adobe's defense when one is in the know as to what is happening one loses track that the customer has no idea what is going on.

We all have this problem with medical doctors, too many doctors do not know how to communicate with their customers and perhaps Adobe has fallen into the same trap.

Bad communication is BAD CUSTOMER SERVICE. Good customer service in this case with LR2 would be to give, us paying customers who actually in the end pay the salaries and benefits, a clear list of problems as you stated and also a time line. Yes such a move will slow down sales but in the long haul will strengthen customer loyalty and mean more and easier profits along the way for Adobe. I for one know I will not be immediately upgrading to CS4 when it comes out, maybe not even upgrade. My intentions before were to upgrade but the aggrevation may not be worth PAYING for.

Actually Julian your post was so clear and to the point that if Adobe
does not put your suggestions into effect then it might be time for us to start searching for other programs. Won't be easy but bad customer service will open the gates for competitors. Adobe has top products and I do not wish to change. Hope Adobe will run a beta on their customer service in order to work the bugs out of it.

Again I love LR2 and but for no good communication, from the customers stand point, and the wasting of our time as customers I would be a promoter instead of luke warm and advising friends not to purchase new or the upgrade LR2

Wolf - Neither the knowledgebase nor this forum in current form provide the needed service. That is, real time updated advice on current software problems, status and solutions.

Knowledgebase is way behind on problems like the topic of this thread. Phone support (at least in Australia/Asia Pacific) is woeful. The first time I rang with a Lightroom 1 problem I was told that Lightroom had not been released yet (it had, I owned it). My next helper was a person of English as a second language background who tried gamely but had no idea what was going on, the third was a formula repeater who told me that they had never heard of my problem and to uninstall and reinstall countless times (their solution whenever the problem doesn't come up on the support database). Altogether no-one helped me at all and I got a lot of misinformation, until I found it was a common problem by reading this forum. Unbelievable.

If the purpose of this forum is for users to communicate to other users, then the purpose of that is to hopefully reduce the official Adobe support workload. It is a part of the support structure and appears to replace non-working parts like phone support, and to provide more timely info. Whatever its original purpose, the fact is that Adobe have not yet got a support method that works efficiently for the problems discussed in this thread. I was offering one suggestion for fixing this gap.

Thanks Wolf, that is good to know. Perhaps if someone early on in this thread had said "we are working hard to fix this problem and will be posting all fixes on an easy to find thread in the knowledgebase (with link provided) as soon as possible, and for future reference that is the best place to find such information", then perhaps we wouldn't be having this conversation now. Your website is not that easy to navigate and we humble users don't know where to go when looking for such info - we assume that these forums are the place. Fabulous if they are not - but let us know. Glad you are now, but this is way down the track.

And instead of saying "I do not profess to claim that this site contains answers to your problems", perhaps you could go and check if it does, and if it doesn't, then go and find the person who is responsible for making sure it does and get them to do it. In functional companies somebody takes responsibility. The buck has to stop somewhere. That may not be with you, but I have worked in customer service for 20 years, and if I identified an issue, and it wasn't within my power to fix it, I would always go and find out who's responsibility it was and make sure someone was onto it, and then let the customer know what was happening. When everyone just sits in their own office saying 'this is someone else's problem', and meanwhile the customer is out of the loop, or the system is too impenetrable for the customer to find their way into the loop - well the system isn't working.

Just to be clear - when you say that the forum is not the primary vehicle for Adobe to communicate to it's users, are you saying the Knowledgebase is? I just want to avoid this problem in the future and be clear about where to find information.

Thanks for letting us know - it is appreciated.

Dear Wolf,

Please educate me as to THE PRIMARY WAY ADOBE COMMUNICATES TO ITS USERS.

>If there was available a high profile summary somewhere of "Known issues with LR 2" that was pointed to in a way that was easily accessible to non-tech people, this would go a long way to easing the confusion and pain.

Adobe maintains a Knowledgebase containing information on all products, including Lr.

I do not profess to claim that this site contains answers to your problems but I do suggest that your claim that Adobe does not respond to customers with information is not true.

By the way, this often chaotic forum is for users to communicate to other users. It is not the primary vehicle in which Adobe communicates to its users.

> What is the point of a beta program if you are not testing the software you aim to release?

The answer to that was stated very clearly in the Beta release notes.

Here here Julian. Couldn't have said it better. Hopefully Adobe will actually listen. They should employ you - heaven knows there is obviously a break-down somewhere in their organisation - both in terms of communication and procedure. A company at this level should be aiming for worlds best practice on all levels. We understand that you don't always get there straight away, but at least acknowledge that there has been a stuff up on a number of levels, and that you are working to correct - not only the program, but the communication between departments, communication with customers, and future testing procedures.

People tend to be forgiving so long as a company is not diving for a____ cover, or avoiding us altogether (I have to say trying to communicate with Adobe has been one of the more frustrating things I have ever tried to do - it is very difficult to get your number of the website,and when you talk to people in tech support it seems like they don't know the programs at all. It really feels like you are thrown to the wolves when you get a program from you guys, and too bad if you can't sort it out. And when such huge bugs have been picked up it shouldn't be sorted out by as Julian said a thread hidden in the bowls of your support forum where an Adobe person will log on every few days - that is such a haphazard way of doing business. It is not like this problem has only been encountered by a couple of people).

By acknowledging mistakes and letting people know what is being done to rectify them, and keeping communciation clear (Julian's method seems perfect and not hard for you to do),then I am sure we will all move on. Dive for a_____ cover and people might start looking around, which would be such a shame, as LR2 is clearly a fabulous program. All it takes is a few tweaks of your procedures and communications and we would all be talking instead about the fabulous new features of LR2. PS: I also really appreciated the help from Adobe people on the forum, but agree that it needs to be a concise sticky, and stronger efforts made to see this from the users point of view, and to value your users time rather than making us value yours.

Kevin - I for one was grateful that you put some time and effort into responding here, but this is not sufficient to help your customers. Please think of this from the users' point of view.

This should be a significant lesson for Adobe but from the responses from you and in other forums it seems the lessons are totally lost. No-one sees the bigger issue.

First, the Beta program was mishandled. The software was simply not ready, and no-one should have sanctioned a beta test period with software that was not complete in terms of functionality or implementation. The tighter integration with CS3 was one of the trumpeted features of V2, and yet the much-hyped beta did not even include the now recognised faulty parts of this. What is the point of a beta program if you are not testing the software you aim to release? Putting it another way, no-one should even think of running a beta in parallel to continued development. It's not rocket science and not insoluble, the simple and obvious solution is to allow more time to allow the completion of the software before unleashing it. (and give up the stupid idea of playing clever marketing games by deliberately including new functionality in the final product beyond what was in the beta). Given the loss of goodwill and productivity as things have happened, this demonstrates perfectly that we would all be better off if V2 had not been released for another month or two, but had been properly tested in its FINAL form beforehand. Adobe continues to treat full-purchase price users as a test bed, without any justification.

Secondly, given that the problems did happen, what I asked for in my earlier post was not just that some Adobe person participates in this kind of thread, but that Adobe proactively consider the user in how they do so.

I can understand why you might think that because you respond every few days this means it is all under control, but from the user's point of view it is completely different. We don't have your intimate knowledge of the software or the situation. We are presented with (in my case) an enormous thread of 282 messages in which the matter is discussed at several different levels of expertise by users, by Adobe staff in disguise and the occasional identified Adobe person. In my example again, what could I do? I had NO choice but to read every single post and spend a lot of time interpreting how relevant and informed it was, whether it represented new info or was erroneous re-hash of what had already been written, whether it applied to my situation, whether it had any Adobe input or not, whether a more informed person contradicted it later. I could not just skip to the end to see what the outcome was because there was no outcome, or at least the best outcomes to the problem was still hidden inside the 282 messages.

This is a hopelessly inefficient situation for non-technical users who know only that their new software doesn't work, or doesn't appear to work. The doesn't APPEAR to work is a big part of the problem.

When such a significant apparent fault is found by an innocent user who has (misplaced) faith in high-profile companies like Adobe, the natural first thought is that you have not understood the software properly. Then you think you must have made an error, then that you have not installed it properly or that your system is at fault or ...

If there was available a high profile summary somewhere of "Known issues with LR 2" that was pointed to in a way that was easily accessible to non-tech people, this would go a long way to easing the confusion and pain. The current system requires you to know that the support forum exists, know how to access it, remember registration details, find your correct forum, find one or more threads that seem to refer to your fault in a huge list of current threads, and finally read what to many people is an incomprehensibly technical and confusing array of posts for info. As for finding out the current situation/cures/workarounds which is the essence of what is needed - if the threads are long they become almost unusable by people with lives to lead or businesses to run.

I already suggested what would solve this situation and it is so obvious I don't know why it isn't company policy. That is, that Adobe as an enterprise takes on the responsibility of maintaining a 'sticky' post at the top of the thread which summarises the problem(s), the current possible workarounds AND where Adobe is up to in properly rectifying the situation. Then, all the user would have to do is read this post and they would KNOW they have the latest Adobe-sanctioned info WITHOUT having to spend a couple of hours reading and trying actions that might be a complete waste of time, or even make the situation worse. This summary would have to be COORDINATED across Adobe teams, so the person maintaining the sticky would need to talk to all relevant areas. e.g. it wouldn't say "we can't tell you anything about the final fix to the Scripting Tools 10.0.1 upgrade problem because that's another area".

Remember that things that seem easy or well-contexted to you appear as a complete nerve-wracking confusion to people who have no relevant knowledge of the workings of the software, or of Adobe as an organisation.

So in this example the 'sticky' summary post would give the info...

- there's a problem with opening files from LR2 to CS3 in the following conditions...
- there's another problem with LR appearing to lose files saved from Photoshop as follows...
- it seems the first is related to ...
- it seems the second is a separate problem caused by ... or ...
- you can workaround the first by ...., or even better by correcting the Adobe 10.0.1 update using the following batch file... or by copying some files as follows.
- you can work around the second by .....
- 1Sep08 - Adobe has determined fixes to problem 2 which will be incorporated in ver 2.0.1 espected to be released in ..... Problem 1 is not yet fixed.
- 9Sept08 (perhaps!) - Problem 1 is fixed in an new patch for CS3 10.0.2 which is now available.

THAT is what we need, and would save an enormous amount of confusion, time wasted, angst, frustration, lost hair and lost production - not to mention Adobe's reputation and sales in the longer term.

As I said appreciated your contribution here and feel that it saved the thread from disintegration, but Adobe needs to think more systematically about these things and apply the necessary resource and systems in order to improve the customer experience by a few orders of magnitude.