Mark Hamburg, Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom programming guru, will be leading work to give Microsoft Windows a sleeker, chicer user interface.

Microsoft and Adobe Systems confirmed Hamburg's move on Monday, but at the time, Microsoft wouldn't share details beyond saying Hamburg would work on "user experience" for the company. However, Chicago photographer and Photoshop consultant Jeff Schewe, who caught a plane to California to attend Hamburg's going-away party, shared a lot more on his blog.

Adobe Lightroom

Credit: Adobe System

"He was heavily recruited by Microsoft and given an unbeatable opportunity to work outside his normal digital imaging field," Schewe said. "Mark was invited by [Microsoft CTO] David Vaskevitch to come lead a team working on the future of operating system user experience at Microsoft."

Schewe also quoted Hamburg about the change: "Given that I find the current Windows experience really annoying and yet I keep having to deal with it, this opportunity was a little too interesting to turn down. I can't imagine doing serious imaging anywhere other than Adobe, but I needed to do something other than imaging for a while."

Hamburg joined Adobe to work on version 2.0 of Photoshop in 1990. After Photoshop 7 was released, he turned his attention to lead Shadowland, the project that became Photoshop Lightroom, a tool regarded by some as having a significantly more refined user interface than Photoshop itself.

Central to Lightroom is the photo in the middle, as large as possible. Adjustment panes can be pulled out from all four sides based on various tasks. The software shifts appearance according to modes for managing catalogs, developing an individual photo, showing slideshows, printing, and creating photo galleries for the Web.

"We wanted Lightroom to seem elegant, to exhibit grace, to show an attention to style beyond the utilitarian aspect that dominated Adobe's products up to that time. We wanted a richer UI experience," Hamburg said in a blog posting.

"One of the goals in Lightroom was to consciously think about the product personality we were trying to create with the expectation that a less accidental personality would induce a stronger emotional reaction in users. That stronger reaction can be both positive and negative," he said. "The second part of this goal was to have enough passionate users to outweigh the detractors."

Finally, he said Adobe wanted to balance power and complexity, adding the latter only when it significantly increased the former.