I’m an amateur photographer for around 10 years. My first choice of photo editing software is Adobe Lightroom and It work pretty fine except for one particular feature for photo adjustment “Auto”. The auto can adjust a photo automatically to make a photo look normal as possible by making changes according to the histogram. The problem is most of the time it does not produce a photo as I wanted, as I saw it. It shows more detail and color and the right exposure but it does not understand the mood and feel of the scene. I need to hit reset and made the adjustment myself as a good photographer should do and you should never use the “Auto” function.
From the example photo above, “Auto” tries to adjust to the right exposure, recover shadow to show the detail of the condominiums, and show the sky detail, the colors are balanced. My intention of this photo is to show the contrast, shape, shadow, reflection during sunset. The “Auto” fails misery to understand the mood of the photo.
I wish the “Auto” is smarter or can be an AI to help. It's pretty far-fetched, no way I can finish it. It takes more time and money which I don't have. I have a better idea. I can just continually press a button to randomly adjust the photo till I like it. Like when you make a character in The Sims. You don’t have to know how to create a character you know it when you see it. It might make an interesting result and can make adjust further to make a better photo. Of course, you gonna need to shoot a good photo first. The random bullshit adjustment not gonna help you to be a better photographer but it might find a new idea for your photo editing, the one that you never try before. I gonna name it the “Random Bullshit” plugin, that comes from a “Random Bullshit Go!” meme of marvel comic. It is the best describe what the plugin can do. You might ask what is the difference between using the presets download from the internet. The presets are limit the possibility. The “Random Bullshit” is endless and you can make a new preset from it too.
The Lightroom plugin needs to be in Lua. I can program in any language, give me some time to learn. In this case, it is not really hard. The hard part is using the Lightroom SDK to connect and control Lightroom functionality. I read the SDK document as a good programmer should do but skip many parts that not gonna use in Random Bullshit. The first version user must call the plugin from the “file” menu -> Plugin Extra -> Random Bullshit -> Go!!!!. It is too many steps just to get a random adjustment. I just want one click to get a random change. I wonder if I could add a “Random” button near the “Previous” and “Reset” buttons on the develop module. Sadly Lightroom not allow to change the UI of the develop module. Well, you can not stop me. I am gonna use the “Reset” button to get the random bullshit. Because the SDK allows the plugin to observe the adjustment change. When it set all to the default value, I’m gonna set it to the random one. Now I can use the “Reset” button to make a random adjustment to the photo in one click. But what if I want to actually reset the photo. Ok, I need to make the way to stop the plug-in. I put the “Go!!!!” and “Stap!!!!” options in the “File -> Plugin Extra” menu to start and stop using the plugin. The Random Bullshit plugin is ready to use.
How to use Random Bullshit
- Download and extract the zip file from the release page https://github.com/artiya4u/randombullshit.lrdevplugin/releases and rename it to “randombullshit.lrdevplugin” without the version number.
- Go to menu “File -> Plug-in Manager” and click the “Add” button, browse the extracted folder “randombullshit.lrdevplugin” to add the plugin.
- Go to menu “File -> Plug-in Extras” Under “Random Bullshit” select “Go!!!!” to start using it.
- Use the “Reset” button on the develop module to get a new random adjustment and stop when you found the adjustment you like.
- Go to menu “File -> Plug-in Extras” Under “Random Bullshit” select “Stap!!!!” to stop using the plugin and return the reset button to the normal functionality.
The Result:
