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

[ratz2]

More Photoshop like clone/healing brushes in Lightroom!
I love retouching in Photoshop, especially with the content aware fill with the healing tool, but Lightrooms tools are clunky. I don't know if there are technical limitations to implementing tools like Photoshop's in Lightroom but it would be GREAT!
I would rather be able to get a baseline retouched image in Lightroom than having to edit in Photoshop and then come back to Lightroom. I would rather just use Photoshop for image alterations.

[areohbee]

Awesome. - thank you Eric :-). Yet I can't help but notice the term "similar" being used. Still a "combo/hybridy" kinda thang, eh?

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Like many Nikon shooters I moved from Capture NX2 to Lightroom 4 for the photo management and publishing conveniences but sad to say the the clone/healing feature set of LR4 pales next to the same though less than impressive Capture NX2 functions. I'm not asking for full Photoshop capability just less of a "hack job" on the clone/heal tools. Thank you very much in advance.

[Kellypix]

Please help me get rid of phone wires and other non-circular junk! It's such a common problem and the only reason I go to Photoshop anymore! I have tried stringing clone-spots like little pearls on a necklace, but get blurry results. Really need content-aware cloning in a line.

[lcgo33]

The spot removal needs a lot of improvement for LR4. It was almost useless in LR3. Something more like content aware would be fantastic.

[Rovanpera]

Are there some other RAW processors that have a fast healing brush then? I haven't seen one.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I have found that Aperture's adjustment brushes, retouch tool, and spot & patch tool are very effective in correcting a majority of repairs I make, and they are certainly much easier to use than LR's limiting design.

[whmitty]

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.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

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.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

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.

[ssprengel]

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.

[whmitty]

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.

[ssprengel]

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.

[allen-c]

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

[AndreMalenfant]

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...

[hsbn]

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

[whmitty]

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.

[areohbee]

Big step in the right direction - thanks Adobe!

(still a challenge to remove things that are near the edges of things and what have you, since you still have to choose a clone source area, which may not match so well (it's not content-aware fill, unlike Photoshop, and unlike NX2), and no way to line things up by rotating clone source area...)

Still, beats the heck out of stringing a line of bubbles...

Cheers,
Rob

[Arnie47]

very big step and major improvement.

But there are some minor flaws: removing things near edges often results in unexpected gradients (e.g. if you have a light and a dark area, it's very tricky to remove things near this edge). The algorithms to select a source automatically often takes unexpected areas (see even in the Adobe videos introducing this feature) and a feature to rotate the source versus the target area would help very much!

but anyway: thanks Adobe to have heared to your community!

[MadManChan2000]

Thanks for your feedback, Arnold. Your points are noted and yes, these are all limitations of the current approach. In particular, the algorithm to select a source currently works better for smooth areas (e.g., sky, skin) and less well for textured areas; this will likely be improved in the future.

[whmitty]

I just tried Nikon's NX2 healing brush again to compare and the new LR5 Beta healing/cloning brush is much more useful and flexible while being superior to LR4's implemenation. Let's hope that any nit-picky flaws are corrected prior to it's official release.

[areohbee]

If you detect any nit-picky flaws, be sure to mention in the Lr5 beta forum:

http://forums.adobe.com/community/lab...

[areohbee]

Can this one be marked "Implemented" now? (I think so)

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Easy to please, are you Rob? :)

While the LR5 beta support of irregular areas is a much welcome improvement, it hardly fits the earlier attitude of "we have to do it completely and absolutely correctly or we don't do it at all".

What about support for rotation between source and target areas?

What about an interactive visualization of the effect on the target (instead of just an opaque white mask painting)?

What about being able to specify the source area first instead of having to find the automatically chosen area in some random place that may not even be within view (Julieanne Kost 's respective video looks more like a "this should be fixed" demo rather than an advert).

What about user-controlled feathering?

This request was never about replicating the power of Photoshop in LR, but I find the current solution to be rather minimalistic.

[Marcus-J-T]

I second TK's comments, the new clone/heal features in LR5 are a great step in the right direction but they're still not enough, and at least rotation & reflection of the source area + feathering is needed to make the tool truly fit for purpose.

[areohbee]

Fair enough TK. (and perhaps I am too easy to please ;-}). Anyway, Eric Chan acknowledged this was a first whack and will likely be improved over time... Cheers, Rob.