In a quick turnaround, Adobe patched a bug causing its Lightroom program to crash after a software update.

“I’d like to personally apologize for the quality of the Lightroom 6.2 release we shipped on Monday”, stated Adobe Product Management Photography Director Tom Hogarty on the company’s official blog this past Friday, “in our efforts to simplify the import experience we introduced instability that resulted in a significant crashing bug”. However, the apology wasn’t met with enthusiasm, as the bug-fixing patch also eliminated some desired features of the program. The update, aside from improving the import process, was intended to enhance several other features of the program including improving haze elimination. It was originally intended to simplify and streamline the program, however this may have been overdone, according to rising user responses expressing discontent with the deleted features.

Hogarty explained that Lightbox’s very birth was based on an open dialogue with photographers and artists who would be most interested in the program, and that a breach of such communication as with these past several updates created many of the issues Adobe is now dealing with. Historically, Adobe has been very responsive with patches, however users have been frustrated in the past with a lack of compensation (such as the ability to back out of a long Adobe Creative Cloud contract), or as with this case, a bug fix which also carries undesirable results with it, which Hogarty addressed with his explanation that “we removed some of our very low usage features to further reduce complexity and improve quality”. Whether or not those features were indeed ‘low usage’ is coming to the surface after a weekend with the new update.