P: More Photoshop like clone/healing/content aware brushes

I'm very disappointed that this feature request did not materialise as a bonus in LR4 final.

As a matter of fact, of the top 21 feature requests, only two were realised. I'm not saying the new LR4 bells and whistles are all useless, but they are not to be found among the popular feature requests.

Makes one wonder about the point of posting feature requests here.

This has always been my major complaint about LR, starting from version 1, so I fully agree with pat d.
I 'd like to add, that I want to be able to make Heal / Clone adjustments in my RAW-files so that they will be there in every application I want to use them for and not just in 1 single [PS] JPG or TIF.

While the OP specifically asks for "brushes", I don't think that it is necessary to regard this implementation detail as mandatory.

If better retouching support can -- e.g., in a first approximation -- be better achieved by allowing selections to be made by drawing polygons, I believe many would regard that as in improvement over the current situation.

Whether the supporting tool is "pixel-based" or not, is not essential to the discussion.

I am not sure what you mean by object. There are photographs and pixels. Anything in between is a subjective construct.

If you are wanting to draw a selection around something and call it an object, that is a job Photoshop which is a pixel-based editor. I would not consider your feature request to be a subset of this topic. I would think this falls more into a "layers" within LR kind of topic.

I don't know if this is related to this topic or not...

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

.. what I'd like to see is the ability to select an object to adjust, rather than to try and "paint" it with brushes.

So, looks like we're not going to see any improvement over the health/clone brush in this release as it has to be carefully thought out.

Hopefully, in a couple of years after the LR4 release, the LR5 will have complete set of retouching tools. At that point I can't see a simple addition of movement will do.

Book and Map don't compete with better cloning and healing, since they would be implemented by different teams.

> How many times does one create a book, compared to retouching an image?

That's not even comparing an orange to an apple, more like a truck to a peanut. First, you couldn't so far create/export a book with either PS or LR. Now you will with LR. You can retouch with PS, that's what PS is good at.

Second, they are not even in the same complexity ballpark from a user point of view. You don't sit down at your computer and say, "I'm going to take a few minutes to create a book". Retouching in LR is usually a small task, here and there in a photo; if it's not you certainly should be using PS's more advanced tools, again, that's what PS excels at. LR is meant to be simple, not replicate PS. Making a book on the other hand is a *lot* more work, encompassing dozens if not hundreds of photos, text, layout, export to different formats, etc. Publishing on Demand (POD) services are getting more and more popular, tackling this feature makes sense to me. While the book as a physical object is nice, I wouldn't be surprised if we also see a companion "export to eBook" function to this feature soon, in LR4 final or as a plugin.

> How many times does one need to rely on an image to be geo-tagged,
> compared to the need to retouch it?

Why do you think your workflow is everybody's workflow? I geo-tag every single of my photos for example. That I welcome this new feature is an understatement and I didn't even ask for it. More and more cameras are created with GPS/auto-geo-tagging capabilities and I find searching by location, visually, on a map, a great way to find my photos across space/time (and it's fun). I very rarely retouch my photos because I lean on the photo-journalistic side of photography, I don't remove elements from my photos, I don't enhance my subject's skin.

> I don't see a "we need a Book and/or Map module" feature request
> that is nearly as popular as this request for better retouching support

The only reason it is popular is because everything but the kitchen sink has been thrown here (correction: the sink is thrown here too once in a while). It has become so long people don't even bother reading the comments, they just add "me too" at the end, thinking something actually implementable can come out of it. It's not even a question of reading people's mind at this point, but sorting out what is really important. This feature request is *exactly* what Hogarty mentioned in the video, there are dozens of ways to retouch and everybody here thinks their way is the best way and should be implemented ASAP. More and more sub-request are merged as well, to the point that nothing is emerging and certainly no satisfying feedback can be given with respect to a *specific* retouching feature you would want to see (say, "content aware brush"), on the off-chance that a developer would sort out said specific feature out of this mess.

So this feature request is helping the cloning/healing brush cause zilch, besides the fact that people vaguely want to see more cloning/brush in LR. Turns out the video post says "Reading between the lines I think we can tell this is at least ON the development table", so what is there here to complain about? It is coming at some point, in some form. That no specific direction is given is no surprise and if you want to find a culprit in the community, look no further than this bloated request.

> even some minimal improvement would be extremely welcome.

Again, to what? Your minimal improvement is *not* other people in this thread's minimal improvement. Read it. People have been asking for widely different things and Hogarty is saying just that. Addressing all these minimal improvements, including yours, would be exactly what you are complaining about: "subsuming every possible retouching approach in PS". Addressing one would make a lot of people here unhappy, possibly you, locked in a retouching "way" that is not yours.

Amen!

One needs to await LR4 final, but if the "we cannot add better retouching support unless it subsumes every possible retouching approach in PS" position will remain the final word, that would be extremely disappointing.

As Jon Miller already said:
a) there are a lot of other "not yet perfect" tools in LR
b) even some minimal improvement would be extremely welcome.

Tom Hogarty's summary of LR4 is "We want to minimize the number of times users need to leave LR". Addressing the sub-par retouching capabilities of LR would have been the best way to achieve that goal.

How many times does one create a book, compared to retouching an image?

How many times does one need to rely on an image to be geo-tagged, compared to the need to retouch it?

For how many years were the LR3 basic panel controls good enough and people were happy with them?

In this feedback forum I do not see a popular "we need new basic panel controls" idea (it came from the Revel/Carousal team). I don't see a "we need a Book and/or Map module" feature request that is nearly as popular as this request for better retouching support.

I don't see a request for letting basic control sliders show "zero" but not have zero effect. I don't see a request for showing a straight line in the tone curve panel even though the effective tone curve is the "medium contrast" curve from LR3.

Surely some of the new LR4 features will be useful to some LR users, but unless LR4 final improves retouching support, Adobe will have a hard time to claim that they are listening to their customers. At least the customers participating on this feedback site will not have been heard optimally.