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.

[LadyEloise]

"Ability to stack/layer multiple clones/healing spots".....EXCELLENT idea and from a programming standpoint, that shouldn't be that hard to do. That would alleviate much time and frustration with the photography that I do.

[sebastien_barre]

> Question : Dear Adobe... are you going to inprove / add this feature yes or NO.

Question: Dear commenters... are you going to stop being overly dramatic or passive aggressive with respect to a feature request that has ballooned to epic proportions, yes or NO?

A follow up: Dear "software programmers by day", are you going to keep telling Adobe what is easy and not easy to implement, without any knowledge of the actual source code?

A good reason (in my book) why this feature hasn't received "acknowledgement" is how absurdly broad it has become (no thanks to some merging with other topics, what's up with that?). Some want content aware cloning, some want layers and stacking, some want different brush shapes, others want healing mask rotation and mirroring, others free-hand selection, or even healing history. A new sub-request pops up every week, flagged as "the most important thing to add to LR since sliced bread", one that certainly would require "very little development resource".

Just re-split the topic already! At least with soft-proofing or geotagging it's not unreasonable (though not guaranteed) to expect "yes/no/here is our plan" from the developers, but why are you guys expecting an acknowledgement on something that *large*? Maybe (I say maybe) if we had different topics, all with the same "healing brush" *tag* and prefix (say Lightroom: Healing Brush: Rotation and Mirroring") to keep it tidy, Adobe could get a chance to chime-in on what is specific enough. In the "Lightroom: Healing Brush: Content Aware" topic we could eventually see something more official like "huhhh, did you notice how CPU intensive content-aware fill is in PS? how do you expect that to work in a non-destructive, real-time app like LR, especially with lens correction on?!" (not what you would want to hear but helpful nonetheless).

[bcdavis1975]

Amen

[areohbee]

A trick for stacking: create apart then move closer together (as opposed to trying to create in close). Not a substitute for a better distraction removal tool but may help get you by in the mean time...

[stemcg70]

Amen to your Amen... Sebastien has put my frustration much more elequently than I . my main point being is there a need for it ,, if yes add it to the development /roadmap and publicise it or dont ... Adobe has a very dedicated and loyal user base (I am becoming one myself)....

As this whole discussion thread demonstrates there is demand for certain features.. I cannot imagine complete feature convergence between all products that would be absurd right?... people have spent money on LR or PS or elements for that matter or all and somehow want more features in their chosen purchase. likewise Adobe have differenct products with different feature sets to meet market demands,... you pays your money and makes your choices....

The point of my yes/no question was aimed at putting an end to endless discussions about the same point that appear to go unanswered or to that matter diverging points as in the beast that this thread has become...

perhaps the moderators of this should end this dicsussion thread in favour of separating the numerous and varied (some valid) ideas that have been pushed forward...

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Keep in mind that the moderators are the ones who merged the topic repeatedly. That's how we see this feature bloat in the request. Like most projects, it's the policies that are getting in the way here. Like the policy of merging any topics that seem even vaguely related.

It would be rather ironic if, as has been postulated, the sheer scope and no-longer-clear-goal of the feature request is what is keeping it from being "formally" acknowledged by Adobe.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Please adobe, Please. Change the cloning/healing spot to a brush. This is my only request of you. I beg of you.

If you were also to add facial recognition too i'd be able to move my personal photo's from apple software to adobe, Which i'd love.

These 2 updates would reduce my photo editing software requirements from 4 programs (LR, PS, Aperture & iPhoto) to just LR and that would be a god send.

[sebastien_barre]

God Luke, did you just add facial recognition to this feature request?! Did you look one comment above? I beg of you (too)!

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Hi Sebastien,

I found your response to be a bit over the top to be honest mate. Just wanted to have my 2c. I really have no interest in reading the entire thread. It's super long and I have a business to run. Hope you can understand.

[sebastien_barre]

Yup, that's what I was implying. I'm not familiar with this community platform, I'm not sure how to identify the moderators, are they members of the community, or appointed by Adobe?

Anyway, this feature request is a train wreck. Nobody bothers looking at the comments anymore. Actually somebody just added yet another comment... that mentions facial recognition. sigh.

What I suggest (it's just a suggestion):
- Let's recreate new topics for sub-requests related to healing/cloning brush,
- Each sub-topic would be tagged "clone" and/or "healing", and the topic title prefixed accordingly (say "Lightroom: Clone Tool: blah blah",
- Each sub-topic could start with one line like this: "PLEASE DO NOT MERGE THIS TOPIC", followed by a paragraph explaining the request itself, followed by a paragraph explaining why this topic should not be merged, pointing to this current mess of a thread. Somebody with a grasp of the English language could come up with that disclaimer 🙂 (i.e., not me),
- If a moderator tries to merge the topic again, the topic owner should try to talk him/her out of it,
- If a commenter tries to pile on that sub-topic, in a way that would lead to a bloated request again, politely re-orient him/her to another topic or suggest he/she creates his/her own topic following the same template.
- Then let's ask a moderator to close this thread.

I do not have a vested interest in the sub-features mentioned so far (my own clone brush request is so minor I didn't bother piling it here), so I would recommend a few people in this thread pick the sub-requests they have at heart, take ownership of the corresponding new topics and keep them un-merged. Maybe in the interest of a consensus we could all work on the list of new topics to create. I'm going to shamelessly steal from M Thicke's bullet points above, a first round of topics could be something like:

* Lightroom: Clone/Healing Tool: Content Aware Fill
* Lightroom: Clone/Healing Tool: Different shaped brushes and Aspect Ratio
* Lightroom: Clone/Healing Tool: Ability to rotate/mirror brushes
* Lightroom: Clone/Healing Tool: Ability to stack/layer multiple clones/healing spots
* Lightroom: Clone/Healing Tool: Better control over edge softness/dither

If you like this idea, mod it up.
Just my 2 cents

[hsbn]

Here is Tom Hogarty (Adobe’s Lightroom product manager) thought about this topic:
http://lightroomkillertips.com/2012/w...

[areohbee]

I was surprised by Tom's comments about the distraction removal. Sounds like the reason it's not there yet is because they don't know what to do yet.

I always envisioned something very simple - no need for a lot of fancy options, just brush away distractions... (NX2's brush has no controls but works quite well).

[VeloDramatic]

All we need is the original brush-based, rubber-stamp clone tool from the earliest days of Photoshop. Forget about content-aware etc for the first iteration.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Seriously. I appreciate the input on the subject from an actual Adobe representative, but this "we have to do it completely and absolutely correctly or we don't do it at all" attitude is contrary to the entire history of Lightroom. From the beginning we knew that all of the tools would evolve over time.

Just the ability to change the shape and rotation or mirroring of the existing tool would be a HUGE improvement. Content aware healing would be nice, but most people seem to agree that the main limiting factor is the static shape and orientation of the tool.

I am very encouraged, though, that this is being seriously considered. I look forward to seeing where they go with it.

[VeloDramatic]

Right on the money Jon.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I appreciate that Tom at least acknowledged the request, which he first did during the live web event, but his latest comment on it doesn't sit very well with me for a few reasons. Right off the bat, I felt that this was his way of giving us what we wanted to hear to basically keep us quiet for a while. After all, we can no longer speculate on anything because, A: He said he'd love to add the feature(s) in, but B: just as we already knew... you can't just copy/paste code from PS to LR, plus they "want to get things right".

And just as Jon has observed, that is a load of nonsense in a bucket. Well, at least the latter part. I mean come on... are the GPS and book features going to be all worked out and meet everyone's expectations out of the gate? Right. Just like every other feature that has had bug fixes applied or that has evolved to where they are now. Can we say slider revisions? Can we say addition of highlight control in place of the recovery slider?

That whole comment was a fail AFAIC. Politics as usual. Nothing to see here I'm afraid.

Doug

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

One needs to await LR4 final, but if the "we cannot add better retouching support unless it subsumes every possible retouching approach in PS" position will remain the final word, that would be extremely disappointing.

As Jon Miller already said:
a) there are a lot of other "not yet perfect" tools in LR
b) even some minimal improvement would be extremely welcome.

Tom Hogarty's summary of LR4 is "We want to minimize the number of times users need to leave LR". Addressing the sub-par retouching capabilities of LR would have been the best way to achieve that goal.

How many times does one create a book, compared to retouching an image?

How many times does one need to rely on an image to be geo-tagged, compared to the need to retouch it?

For how many years were the LR3 basic panel controls good enough and people were happy with them?

In this feedback forum I do not see a popular "we need new basic panel controls" idea (it came from the Revel/Carousal team). I don't see a "we need a Book and/or Map module" feature request that is nearly as popular as this request for better retouching support.

I don't see a request for letting basic control sliders show "zero" but not have zero effect. I don't see a request for showing a straight line in the tone curve panel even though the effective tone curve is the "medium contrast" curve from LR3.

Surely some of the new LR4 features will be useful to some LR users, but unless LR4 final improves retouching support, Adobe will have a hard time to claim that they are listening to their customers. At least the customers participating on this feedback site will not have been heard optimally.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Amen!

[sebastien_barre]

> How many times does one create a book, compared to retouching an image?

That's not even comparing an orange to an apple, more like a truck to a peanut. First, you couldn't so far create/export a book with either PS or LR. Now you will with LR. You can retouch with PS, that's what PS is good at.

Second, they are not even in the same complexity ballpark from a user point of view. You don't sit down at your computer and say, "I'm going to take a few minutes to create a book". Retouching in LR is usually a small task, here and there in a photo; if it's not you certainly should be using PS's more advanced tools, again, that's what PS excels at. LR is meant to be simple, not replicate PS. Making a book on the other hand is a *lot* more work, encompassing dozens if not hundreds of photos, text, layout, export to different formats, etc. Publishing on Demand (POD) services are getting more and more popular, tackling this feature makes sense to me. While the book as a physical object is nice, I wouldn't be surprised if we also see a companion "export to eBook" function to this feature soon, in LR4 final or as a plugin.

> How many times does one need to rely on an image to be geo-tagged,
> compared to the need to retouch it?

Why do you think your workflow is everybody's workflow? I geo-tag every single of my photos for example. That I welcome this new feature is an understatement and I didn't even ask for it. More and more cameras are created with GPS/auto-geo-tagging capabilities and I find searching by location, visually, on a map, a great way to find my photos across space/time (and it's fun). I very rarely retouch my photos because I lean on the photo-journalistic side of photography, I don't remove elements from my photos, I don't enhance my subject's skin.

> I don't see a "we need a Book and/or Map module" feature request
> that is nearly as popular as this request for better retouching support

The only reason it is popular is because everything but the kitchen sink has been thrown here (correction: the sink is thrown here too once in a while). It has become so long people don't even bother reading the comments, they just add "me too" at the end, thinking something actually implementable can come out of it. It's not even a question of reading people's mind at this point, but sorting out what is really important. This feature request is *exactly* what Hogarty mentioned in the video, there are dozens of ways to retouch and everybody here thinks their way is the best way and should be implemented ASAP. More and more sub-request are merged as well, to the point that nothing is emerging and certainly no satisfying feedback can be given with respect to a *specific* retouching feature you would want to see (say, "content aware brush"), on the off-chance that a developer would sort out said specific feature out of this mess.

So this feature request is helping the cloning/healing brush cause zilch, besides the fact that people vaguely want to see more cloning/brush in LR. Turns out the video post says "Reading between the lines I think we can tell this is at least ON the development table", so what is there here to complain about? It is coming at some point, in some form. That no specific direction is given is no surprise and if you want to find a culprit in the community, look no further than this bloated request.

> even some minimal improvement would be extremely welcome.

Again, to what? Your minimal improvement is *not* other people in this thread's minimal improvement. Read it. People have been asking for widely different things and Hogarty is saying just that. Addressing all these minimal improvements, including yours, would be exactly what you are complaining about: "subsuming every possible retouching approach in PS". Addressing one would make a lot of people here unhappy, possibly you, locked in a retouching "way" that is not yours.

[Lee_Jay]

Book and Map don't compete with better cloning and healing, since they would be implemented by different teams.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

So, looks like we're not going to see any improvement over the health/clone brush in this release as it has to be carefully thought out.

Hopefully, in a couple of years after the LR4 release, the LR5 will have complete set of retouching tools. At that point I can't see a simple addition of movement will do.

[pevp0tik_ynp9_o-e]

I don't know if this is related to this topic or not...

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

.. what I'd like to see is the ability to select an object to adjust, rather than to try and "paint" it with brushes.

[Rikk-Flohr: Do not Use]

I am not sure what you mean by object. There are photographs and pixels. Anything in between is a subjective construct.

If you are wanting to draw a selection around something and call it an object, that is a job Photoshop which is a pixel-based editor. I would not consider your feature request to be a subset of this topic. I would think this falls more into a "layers" within LR kind of topic.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

While the OP specifically asks for "brushes", I don't think that it is necessary to regard this implementation detail as mandatory.

If better retouching support can -- e.g., in a first approximation -- be better achieved by allowing selections to be made by drawing polygons, I believe many would regard that as in improvement over the current situation.

Whether the supporting tool is "pixel-based" or not, is not essential to the discussion.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

This has always been my major complaint about LR, starting from version 1, so I fully agree with pat d.
I 'd like to add, that I want to be able to make Heal / Clone adjustments in my RAW-files so that they will be there in every application I want to use them for and not just in 1 single [PS] JPG or TIF.