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

Yes indeed I look forward to the new Advanced Healing Brush in Lightroom 5. The description looks to address the many requests for just such a capability in lightroom. We shall see.

See LR5 beta ... Maybe not as good as Photoshop but still amazing. Hooray!
http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjourn...

This is quite an old thread but, yes, much needed improvements. My take is there are technical limitations and the current content aware/cloning algorithms are built for pixel-level editing and are not easily modifiable to work in LR/Camera Raw...

Adobe explains that in more marketing-friendly terms as "when they add features to Lightroom they want to make sure that they’re features that are well planned and thought out, easy to use, and can work within the overall structure of Lightroom".

To me, this is just a sugar-coated way to say that the cost of building it in LR/Camera Raw cannot be justified by LR sales just yet. And there is always the risk of taking a hit on the PS sales, which costs 4 times more...

1. Yes, add to and improve LR adjustment tools
2. LR must at all costs continue to be non-destructive

The impediment to #1 may be continual CPU usage so #2 was added to remove that excuse.

LR's spotting tool was originated to fix dust specks on the sensor which are generally circular, and you could even create a preset to do this across multiple images.

At some point the preset option was removed, and the tool had heal added to the original clone mode, so the tool's evolution is toward more general retouching operations where easily-definable non-circular selections are a next step.

Item #1 sounds to be the better of the two. Again, MV's Wireworm functionality is excellent and worthy of examination if Adobe see's fit to allow LR users the luxury of at least a linear defect removal tool. Only providing cloning/healing of circles is as crude as such a tool could possibly get. I find it surprising that Adobe has let this issue twist in the wind for this long.

As you can see by the thread your request has been merged into, this is a popular enhancement request for LR.

As of now a destructive editor like Photoshop is a much better tool to use because the CPU required to compute the heal/clone is done once and the new pixels become part of the image. So instead of importing your scans into LR, perhaps they should first be cloned/healed in Photoshop and then be imported into LR.

With a non-destructive editor such as Lightroom, the result of the healing or cloning operation must be recomputed every time anything else that affects the overall image is performed.

In my mind, there are two parts of this request:

1) Enhance LR to allow easier selection of non-circular areas for healing/cloning, perhaps similar to how the adjustment brush selections work.

2) Add some smart shapshots to LR's operation so the CPU required to compute the results of a healing/cloning/adjustment-brush adjustments is done only once and then the results are persisted so the CPU isn't used to recompute the entire image each time something is tweaked afterwards. I think this second thing is already done in memory as you're working, but perhaps a separate on-disk cache would also be helpful.

I shoot both digital and film. I do all the scanning myself and do most of the processing in Lightroom. This involves removing dust spots from the scans. The Spot removal tool is fine here obviously.

Occasionally I'll have a drying mark or a scratch even, that I'd like to remove. Lightroom can't do this easily. The only way really is to use the spot removal tool copious times, which is very time and CPU consuming.

Of course there's Photoshop, but I find exporting an image to another heavy software just to remove a simple scratch quite cumbersome, and would instead like to use an improved spot removal tool on Lightroom. I can understand exporting to Photoshop for something like merging several images, but not for this.

Here's a recent example of an image where I had some drying marks.

Corel AfterShot Pro springs to mind. If you don't mind a destructive editing workflow, there is also Sagelight; a wonderful tool, BTW, if only it supported a non-destructive workflow.

I've found that after racking up some time using the LR4 healing brush that I have become much more efficient when using it. That said I use MV's Wireworm plugin frequently in PS to eliminate telephone wires and such. The "healing" scheme used in Wireworm is quite good compared to any other I've employed and very similar to the healing brush available in Nikon's Capture NX2. I abandoned NX2 for LR4 as I preferred the nicer and quicker interface in LR4. Unfortunately when I contacted Wireworm's author and inquired as to whether a similar tool for L4 would be considered I was advised that implementing it in LR4 required a complete re-write and thus would not happen any time soon. Apparently LR and PS are quite different under the hood.