P: "Restore" paint mode for transition areas of graduated/radial filters

When you are brushing, you can hold down the Alt/Option key and the panel's Reset button (bottom of panel) changes to Reset Brushes. This isn't very obvious.

This is unbelievable. I just used this for the first time and cannot believe the way this works. How did something so crippled make it through to a release. Why not hold off a bit and release a feature that is actually useful?

I just realized that this entire issue becomes an even bigger problem when copying and pasting gradients from one image to another.

Say that you added a gradient on an image and then used the Brush mode to erase part of it. Now if you copy and paste on another image, more than likely the gradient will no longer match/align with the objects/composition of the new image.

I know you can reset the Radial Filter Brushes, but if all you need is a minor adjustment, it's overkill to reset and painstakingly paint out again everything needed.

I am attaching an image as an example where I painted out part of a radial filter so that it doesn't affect the mountains in the back. I then tried to paste the settings onto another similar image but with slightly different composition and found myself facing the problem I described.

Does anyone from Adobe want to weigh in on this matter?

You're right, Andrei - maybe more than a checkbox or modifier to paint back in (as if it was some kind of "special feature") what we need is simpler: just to make "paint in/out" (or erase/restore) the default behavior.

The ability to also paint/erase regardless of the original gradation in the mask (in other words, painting "solid" areas even where there was a transition), could be a nice feature. It adds flexibility and I can think of some uses for it. But as you say, if need be, truth is we can already woraround that by duplicating the same parameters with the adjustment brush, while right now there's nothing we can do to recover the original gradation of the mask along the transition areas... short of deleting everything and starting over.

I trust this will be considered sooner or later (in fact it's strange that AFAIK, nobody suggested it yet after ACR 8.5 came out - I thought about posting this idea back then, but I thought I would wait until it was implemented in LR, because I hoped this problem would be fixed by then, i.e. by now...).

Thanks.

Same here. I was happy to see this being finally introduced in Lightroom CC, but the fact that you cannot restore (paint back in) the graduated/radial mask stumps me.

The whole reason of the Brush feature in a graduated/radial filter is to brush out the graduated mask, so that it doesn't affect certain parts of the image. If I can brush OUT the mask, i should also be able to brush IN the original (graduated) mask. I shouldn't have to delete everything, redraw my graduated filter and then attempt to brush out certain parts again.

Thus, when it comes to the graduated/radial filter the brush should only allow to paint IN or OUT the graduation mask. For any other kind of brushing, the regular adjustment brush can be used.

Here's the flow as I see it:

- You draw a graduated/radial filter (for the sky for example)
- You use the new Brush mode of the filter to paint OUT certain parts of the graduation (over the moutains, let's say, if it's a landscape, so the mountains are not affected by graduated filter).
- If you make a mistake and paint out too much of the sky, you need to be able to paint back IN the graduated filter (the graduation), instead of painting IN like with a normal brush, which would make it very obvious that one part is faded and the other is solid.

I am including an example image to illustrate this. In this example, I painted out too much of the graduated filter that covers the sky (around the trees on the left). I would like to fix this by erasing what I brushed out and restoring the graduated filter over that region only.

If I attempt to do this, notice how the graduation is not respected (in the second example image).

Overall, I feel this feature is very helpful and needed but at the same time it is incorrectly implemented, seriously limiting its practicality.

I hope the Adobe team will consider this, correct it and issue an update to LR CC in the near future.

Thanks.