I know Lightroom is designed primarily for photographers, but I also use Lightroom to manage graphic design assets, and a lot of said assets have transparent backgrounds. I gotta figure it's not just me doing this. It would be great if Lightroom had better handling for transparency, including being able to show the transparency grid in grid thumbnails/loupe and honoring transparency in Prints.
The current behavior of Lightroom seems to be to fill the background for any transparency with a flat white. While I uderstand that might be the easiest way to deal with it, that behavior isn't in line with (as far as I know) every other Adobe product out there. Plus, it gets super confusing when you're trying to sort through a bunch of images when you can't tell what's solid white, transparent white, or just transparent.
Additionally, when laying out Prints, transparency is treated the same as in grid/loupe views. For example, if I have a composition on which I would like to add a logo watermark, but I don't want the watermark to show up on every photo, I could just add a frame for my logo to sit on top of everything- but then it displays with a solid white background. It's also a problem if I want to have a page background color that's not white.
The workarounds for this are... honestly just extra work that shouldn't be necessary (eg. exporting a layout, then watermarking the exported layout).
I kinda hope I'm missing something and this is hidden somewhere in settings, and I'm just not seeing it (you know, because it's something I'm looking for... like the pencil that I swear was still in my hand, or the keys that are directly under my nose every time I can't find them before work in the morning). But I did a bit of digging and.... well, that's why I'm here.
Kudos
-H