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.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

And isn't Photoshop already bloated enough?

[russian_box]

i hate the back and forth into Photoshop because lightroom doesn't have things like the content aware brush.

SO how about we make Photoshop handle RAW better, and at the same time make lightroom have the content aware brush, That way WE both have the features of the other?

what this whole topic is about is lightroom not having Photoshop features. when i am merely saying i wish Photoshop had some lightroom features, such as non destructive RAW workflow 🙂

[Lee_Jay]

"what this whole topic is about is lightroom not having Photoshop features. when i am merely saying i wish Photoshop had some lightroom features, such as non destructive RAW workflow 🙂 "

It does - Camera Raw is non-destructive.

[dougryan]

Problem with integrating LR FEATURES in to PS, is that the latter is bloated enough ad it is. Adding cataloging and other LR features would make it a pig stuck in the mud. No thanks. Honestly though, a proper healing brush is the only thing I believe, which would complete LR. I just installed iphoto on my wifes MacBook pro, and even IT has a better retouching tool than LR. It's downright embarrassing IMO.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Adding Lightroom features to Photoshop will work for those who are prepared to own Photoshop. It cannot be the solution for everyone.

Going with Lee Jay's analogy, it would be like asking all car owners to buy a Boing 787, just because they want a car that has usable wipers.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Sometimes I abuse the spot removal tool to remove other things than pimples. E.g. power sockets or hair. For that it would be great to have another mean of selecting the area which is to be healed/cloned.

I would like to have rectangle tool as well as a free hand tool to do that!

[Marcus-J-T]

Me too, it's tedious and frustrating having to move all these spots around, being able to PAINT the healing/cloning is what we need... which fits in with other requests elsewhere (and not just from myself) about a wider range of adjustments for the adjustment brush, and being able to masks for adjustment gradients - painting clones & heals should be merged into this.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

At the VERY, VERY, VERY least can we get a control to rotate the current tool as it heals? This should require very little development or performance resources, and would go a long way to solving this problem for us.

For that matter such a rotation (and other distortions, like mirroring, as are available in the clone stamp tool settings in PS) should be part of the "real", long-term solution.

But if that isn't available in LR4 PLEASE at least grant us the ability to rotate our cloning and healing spots so we can continue to "hack" it to work for non-pimples.

Thank you!!

[Marcus-J-T]

Yes PLEASE, I asked for this ages ago myself in the beta feedback forum...

Rotation & mirroring is desperately needed to solve the fundamental problem of healing perspective-distored tiled patterns, which feature in a significant number of the images that I work on, and currently can't be fixed without shelling out to PS and thereby destroying the pure RAW workflow.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I'm pretty convinced that Adobe just wants to sell more product and the "solution" is to buy both PS and LR. If they put layers and real clone/heal tools into LR, people won't buy PS as much. It's a shame because it drives people to their competition.

[dougryan]

I'd have to agree. It appears to be pure politics. Aperture 3 at $79 vs. LR 3 at more than triple the price (granted, selling digitally gets rid of a lot of overhead costs) should show this. It's really not even necessary to sell disks anymore. I asked Adobe for ONLY a digital download and to not send a disk, but they refused. What a waste of resources.

I understand that there are only so many people devoted to each project (PS and LR etc..) but to have us believe that features such as those which are found in PS Elements could not be incorporated in to LR sounds preposterous. I own Aperture as well, but unfortunately do not like it nearly as well as LR in terms of where my workflow is concerned.

[Lee_Jay]

This sort of comment comes up a lot, and it's just dead wrong. Period. Resources are limited.

LR and PS/Elements are so fundamentally different that not much of the editing code is transferable.

[dougryan]

Dead wrong, period? Do you work for Adobe? If so, then thanks for the heads up. Guess I'll toss LR in the trash and forget about LR4 if resources are so "limited". After all, why would one want to invest their money into something with such limited resources?

And if you do not work for Adobe, then why speak for them in such a manner ? Also, it's not a matter of transferring code. It's about spending R&D money wisely. The two programs ARE absolutely inherently different, I agree with you. And this should be a fundamental reason for having the "resources" available for both teams. It's an absolute cop-out to say that it would be difficult to write in the code necessary to add these desired features.

So which is it.. Employee, or apologist?

[Lee_Jay]

I 'm not an employee, but they have said this publicly on many occasions in the past and there's no reason to believe they are lying, especially when you consider the thousands and thousands of feature requests here in this forum (everyone expects their personal favorite to be immediately implemented), and the many features that have been added over the last few years.

[dougryan]

Just curious, do you have any links to any of the comments made by Adobe? Not because I'm doubting you, but because it would go a long way towards helping me make a decision about sticking with LR for the long term.

As for the thousands of feature requests, I would imagine that a great deal of them would actually fit the curriculum of current feature sets, and would simply be expanding upon existing code. But something bigger, such as our topic here, seems to be a feature which goes beyond the casual musing (I think ) and demand a bit more attention.

Ya know what would be neat? To get feature request stats. Round about numbers related to which are the most requested or talked about. Does such a thing exist?

[sebastien_barre]

I'm with Lee Jay, come on now. They are completely different apps, Photoshop is way way bigger, and they have totally different workflows, one being completely non-destructive, the other much less. One is vastly older than the other too, so no, in terms of software engineering, there is really no reason to assert features would be easily "copied over", or "available to both teams". The "you are not an employee" argument goes both ways, unless you are an employee deep in LR's code, saying "This should require very little development or performance resources" doesn't help much, this a classic disconnect between developers and users.

Furthermore, "layers and real clone/heal tools" as Ron mentioned are just a few of the numerous tools in PS, they might seem essential to you but other people could name other tools equally essential to them and swear they should be in LR. The lines has to be drawn somewhere and priorities set. I'm an avid photographer for example, and I barely use the healing/cloning tools because I have issues removing elements out of photographs, I'm more on the photo-journalistic "authentic" side. I use it for big dust spots, but if you have 50 of them, might as well invest in cleaning your sensor. My point is: your mileage may vary, so let's focus on features/fixes that show some form of consensus.

[dougryan]

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

[sebastien_barre]

> 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...

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

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.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

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?

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

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.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

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.

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

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.

[Marcus-J-T]

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.

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

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.