P: How about an adjustment brush for noise reduction?

What?

'Implemented' ?

Awesome! - a very welcome enhancement - thanks again...

I guess this comes down to where Lightroom ends and Photoshop begins ... and perhaps one discriminator is performance. For example, LR is very efficient size-wise with all the adjustments to a raw file taking only a few kilobytes or megabytes. Bring the same file into Photoshop and the file swells to hundreds of megabytes ... but now complex masks, for example, are processed very fast. This is important for me because I hold tens of thousands of images in Lightroom as developed raw files and only a few thousand that have been finished off in Photoshop. If adding features in Lightroom meant that I would have all the power of Photoshop that would be great ... but not if it came with a huge penalty in file size or processing requirement.

This really came to light for me when I took a batch of photos at f22 with a dirty sensor and the visible dust on the images was massive: I removed all the dust in one image in LR then synchronised all the other images. I then found that rendering the images was so slow that I got rid of the dust removal in Lightroom and did it in Photoshop instead. (BTW - my PC has 16GB memory, an i7-2600K processor, SSDs and performance disks, etc., so it's a fast machine by today's standards and yet it struggled with the dust removal).

So when it comes to voting for additional features in Lightroom I will favor features that do most of what I want but continue to do it efficiently rather than features that do everything that I want but do so at a high performance or file-size hit.

If I was a photographer who did all of his processing in Lightroom then my voting would be different 🙂

You're not wrong, but I think we should focus on how we want to work, and leave performance/efficiency concerns to Adobe to worry about & compromise on...

Yes of course that would be nice - but I was thinking of the processing overhead in Lightroom and also ease of use and not changing the user interface too much.

Another option that might not be too heavy on resources would be to be able to drag and skew the gradient bars (so drag them into a rectangular area and then skew them to cover more or less of the area).

@RC - the problem with using opposite brush adjustment values to counteract a global modifier value is that as soon as you tweak the value of the global modifier you have to manually tweak the brush setting again to counteract it, as there is no link, they are completely independent.

Whereas, if every global modifier also had the option of a brush-applied mask (rather like a layer mask bound to an adjustment layer in photoshop) then you could quickly make (and continue to progressively tweak & refine) global changes to the whole image while excluding certain masked parts of the image from those adjustments.

This is in some ways equivalent to achieving the same via the existing brush tool, but that (currently) only features a subset of the full range of possible adjustments, and clearly it's also easier (and more efficient for LR) to paint a mask on the thing you want to exclude (as per my suggestion) rather than to paint everything else (as one would have to do at present).

While rectangles might be sufficient in some cases, surely combining a gradient adjustment filter with a brush-applied mask would most open up the possibilities for creativity...?

@8904639/RM - Yes, that's been available for some time, very handy...