P: How about an adjustment brush for noise reduction?

You can see the mask as you're applying the brush. Just check the "Show Selected Mask Overlay" in the task bar under the image after you've clicked on the brush tool. It will show the mask in pink as you apply the brush.

Effectively Lightroom does use an edit mask - but instead of painting on the mask as in Photoshop, you paint directly on the image. You can see the mask by hovering the brush over the adjustment point. So this is a user interface preference really. However it would be nice to be able to click on the adjustment point (after hovering on it to show the mask) and then to be able to edit the mask visually. (As a workaround this can be done now by sliding the exposure all the way to the right, for example, as this effectively shows the mask in white).

More adjustments would be great of course - but I would like to see better ways of applying them too, especially using gradients, as these are much more efficiently implemented in Lightroom and also easier to use than a brush.

So more gradients (as in Photoshop) would be very useful. The ability to apply them to a rectangular selection would be lovely.

Based on a comment by Eric Chan in this thread:

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

its very possible Lr4 will include additional locals, but *not* all.

Thus, I recommend conveying your top choices for consideration on that thread (although it may be too late to influence what goes into Lr4 at this point(?)).

Interesting idea. As it stands, Lightroom allows negative values for all the locals it does support, which means its possible to "mask" any of those global adjustments. So would the distinction here be that instead of applying a negative number additively, this new modifier "mask" would apply a negative percentage instead of a negative offset? Or is the distinction just a UI thing? Or an implementation thing? (bitmap vs. "strokes").

Perhaps Adobe knows exactly what you are driving at and why, but some clarification would help some forumers (at least one anyway) to know what the rationale is for a new modifier mask vs local masking as implemented.

I mean my initial reaction to this idea is negative - introducing another way to accomplish the same thing would be like changing horses in mid-stream... - but maybe I just don't understand the advantages of your idea.

I'd go further than that and say that in addition to all modifiers being available as local edits (an extension of what we already have), there should also be a local edit mask for every modifier (completely new).

I like the idea of having a noise reduction mask (with a slider like the sharpening mask) better than the idea of a noise reduction brush. The reason being that all of Lightroom is non-destructive, so all the painting ends up bloating the xmp file (or the dng file if that's how you do it) ... which is OK, except that every time the image is rendered Lightroom has to do a load of processing (have you ever tried removing LOTS of dust from an image and seen how Lightroom then struggles?). The sharpening mask seems to be processed much more efficiently so I would expect a noise reduction mask to be the same.

Photoshop is there for more selective noise reduction.

(But I guess some photographers never use Photoshop and do everything in Lightroom - so they want everything in Lightroom. And of course just because a feature is there doesn't mean you have to use it).

This is, of course, a great idea. But more broadly, ALL the edit features in LR should be available as local edits when using the brush. Including NR, Tone Curve, HSL adjustments, etc. About the only things that would probably be impractical to implement at the distortion tools.

Local sharpening at -50 masks 100% of global sharpening effect.
-1 to -49: masks 2% to 98%.
(beware: local sharpening at -51 to -100 blurs)
(and for completeness: local sharpening at 1 to 100 adds the local amount to the global amount for net effect).

And of course there's the sharpening masking slider (set globally, but like all global sharpening sliders - it effects local sharpening too).

I am sure it has been stated elsewhere but just adding a mask slider that works in reverse of the sharpening slider would be great.