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

> How much more consensus do you need than this very frequently
> requested feature?

And you are surprised it's not acknowledged why? How can that feature requests be more vague: "More Photoshop like clone/healing/content aware brushes in Lightroom!". That is a huge chunk of possibilities, just look around, people asking for rotation of clones, people asking for "adjustable shapes like rectangles with rounded corners" (!), etc. I could get behind some, certainly not some others, and it's hurting the request at this point.

As a "former project manager", if you have use a bug tracker system, then you know this feature would have to be split or re-specified into smaller chunks because it's way too vague. If you want a chance to have some of it implemented, I think that request should be re-formulated, or its description point at sub-requests that people can vote on (and these sub-requests *not* being re-merged into a bigger blog).

It has a lot of votes *because* it's vague. As a developer I will look at it and be "OK, it's popular, but how does that help me besides a vague direction, many people seem to want different things here, where do I start?". It doesn't mean said developer wouldn't start adding something towards that goal, but some people in this thread might still be unhappy.

Yes, I agree, there are hundreds of 'easy' features that aren't implemented yet - my point was simply that a feature as popular as this would be very high on the agenda if it was easy. The fact it hasn't happened yet says a lot.

And yes, some raw-to-warped code is already present, but that 'extra layer of functionality on top' would not be quick or easy. The ACR team don't tend to sit around twiddling their thumbs!

The idea has my full support - all I'm saying is "just do X" and "it'd be easy" are unrealistic.

There are plenty of easy-to-implement features that have been requested for a long time but still aren't implemented - colour coding & tagging folders being one obvious one...

And all the difficult raw-to-warped code is already present for the existing heal/clone, so fulfilling this request only requires building another layer of functionality on top.

This is undoubtedly a very popular request, and one we'd all love to see. If it was easy to implement though, don't you think they'd have done it by now?

It's not quite as simple as copying some logic from Photoshop. When you clone in Photoshop, the pixels are in a fixed state. When you clone in Lightroom, everything has to be calculated from the raw data, and it has to take into account things like the warping from lens corrections.

That's not to say it won't happen, because they've already done some amazing things with Lightroom and ACR. It just means it might not be as quick as we'd all like.

BTW, this is from the "Photoshop Guy" (Matt Kloskowski) from his Skin Softening in Lightroom tip.

"One of the tips I show is using the Adjustment Brush for softening skin. It goes over amazing! People absolutely lose their minds over this one. Mainly because unless you know Lightroom really well, you’d never know there was a skin softening brush in it. Plus, people who like using Lightroom like staying in Lightroom and not going over to Photoshop. This is just one more way that helps you do that."

So,

1. people "lose their minds" over retouching abilities in LR.
2. people who like using LR, like staying in LR (and not going over to PS).
3. We are asking for "just one more way of helping us do that".

This is not just some random feature request. It clearly is important to a large number of people.

Allowing clone content to be rotated before it is applied would really be easy to implement.

Also, offering other shapes -- even adjustable shapes like rectangles with rounded corners and user-definable aspect ratios would not be difficult to implement either.

As long as the "stamp" metaphor is kept, little tweaks like the above would be easy to implement, not be devastating to performance, and go a long way of improving distraction removal support in LR.

My vote goes to a brush-like tool but the above would be useful to have as well.

How much more consensus do you need than this very frequently requested feature? Certainly no set of features, regardless of how large, would ever satisfy everyone. Lee Jay has made that point very vocally since the first public betas.

Despite your doubts I am quite certain that the simple rotation of the current cloning and healing tools would require very little additional development work and performance resources. We're talking about the slightest modification of how it already blends a cloned source. This is not an entirely new feature. And the fact that the code does exist in Photoshop is a tremendous shortcut. Not that the code can be copied directly, but because the LR developers can refer to the logic used to construct the previous tool, should the logical method not already be clear to those who would implement this solution.

And I can say with some authority, as a former project manager at a software firm (digital imaging software, no less) that if code for Photoshop is not available to the Lightroom developers then the entire project is being severely mismanaged. What good would it do any of the team to not have the resources to avoid reinventing the wheel? Not to mention the ability to learn very specifically from the past.

I appreciate your sentiments and consideration of the limited resources of any development team. But your arguments seem misplaced. The clone source rotation truly is a simple matter, and this is one of the most highly requested features for the application, so why then argue here about focusing on features and fixes that show some form of consensus? I would point out that no other feature in the entire Photoshop family has more votes than this one. Again I ask, how much more consensus do you need?

Lee Jay, you wrote "(everyone expects their personal favorite to be immediately implemented)" which has some truth to it but bear in mind that this feature request is the most popular by a big margin. It is anyone's guess as to why it hasn't received an "Under Consideration" yet.

Regarding "limited resources": I do not think that the code for better distraction removal support would be developed by the LR team as such. It would be developed by the ACR coders. I believe that any ACR development would benefit from resources available to Photoshop development and I don't expect any scarcity of resources here.

I am convinced that no one working on LR as such would have to divert time to develop better distraction removal support. All the LR team would have to do is to provide the UI elements that allow usage of the new ACR functionality.

If I'm wrong, I'd be more than happy to be corrected by an Adobe employee.

> then where exactly is that line drawn?

If some type of photography requires more destructive manipulation, then yes, the line is drawn by virtue of a design choice: LR was designed to be non-destructive, nothing wrong with that, and it's not false advertising either. My gut feeling is that if you are in the fashion or advert business, then really, you have budgeted and integrated the price of your tools already, and PS is way *way* cheaper than hours and hours worth of a pro fashion photog, let alone professional photo gear/glass. Really, as far as I'm concerned, this debate between PS and LR in terms of pricing/feature only matters for amateur photographers (I'm one).

I know PS well and not only having to use it less was a blessing, but I felt the cost of switching from non-destructive (LR) to destructive (PS) made me question what I was doing, the validity of it. For example, and I'm not making that up, I was working today on a photo to submit to a show. It was very poorly framed because I shot it from the hip in NYC, as part of a street photography series I'm "working" on. The photo, the interactions in it, according to my buddies, was great though, but one subject was way way too close to the left border of the frame. There was no way to salvage that composition in LR. As an exercise, I fired PS and created more "street" to the left, out of other street elements, to give breathing room to the subject. I emailed it for feedback and as my friend put it: "Not too shabby at all, now the question is: can you live with yourself? ;)". Exactly. I had the tool to do it... it was certainly going to make the photo better... but it was not the way I wanted to make photos. So I printed and submitted the weaker compo.

I've no clue about Aperture so I can't judge. Different teams, different software design maybe, I don't know. I don't think copying the competition is always a good thing.

> With the way you guys speak about resources, one would think that there
> are two old farts on the LR dev team!

Then just go to "Help -> About Lightroom". Do you see an army of engineers here? It was established a long time ago in software engineering that throwing more people at a problem/application doesn't necessarily scale linearly. We do great, big apps in my company, but we really don't put 100 people behind them, there are a lot of advantages to a smaller, more nimble team, I can get behind that. I'm already happily surprised that this forum exists, this is much better than what went on from LR2 to LR3. So let's just sit back and relax, watch crowd-sourcing at work. "Useful" features will percolate, and if the solution to one's problem is to have both tools, then that's not a terrible thing, at least you have a solution...

I acknowledged that they are completely different apps. But PS being "bigger" has very little to do with my opinion on the matter. Workflow is another story, however. If we are to look at PS and LR from a purely photographic workflow standpoint, then where exactly is that line drawn?

Should we say that PS is only to be used for studio, fashion and advert shoots, while LR is relegated to photojournalism, street shooting and the occasional family portrait ? Because that is what you seem to be inferring IMO. I do a lot of street work, myself, so I understand where you're coming from. On the other hand, I'll also do studio work which might call for the occasional brush or two. And as I've experimented with in Aperture, I've found that going in to PS is totally unnecessary.

Only editors for magazines should have to enter that realm at this point in the game, and gladly, I'm not one of them. Editing with a non destructive workflow shouldn't be a huge factor here, as pointed out with my Aperture 3 example. As for PS being older, again, Aperture is just as old as LR is. With the way you guys speak about resources, one would think that there are two old farts on the LR dev team!

And once more for the record... I never stated that features should or could be copied over. Perhaps you replied before I even got a chance to respond the second time around.

Doug