Layers in Lightroom

[Guest]

I'm a professional photographer and am wondering why selective edting with a brush is only available with exposure,  brightness, contrast, saturation, clarity, and sharpness corrections? Why can't I selectively edit with all the editing tools? Do you know how much more useful Lightroom would be if I could selectively edit with a recovery brush, fill light brush, black point brush, vibrance brush, color temp brush, tint brush, color channels brush, sharpening brush, etc? If all these extra tools are useful, and they are, wouldn't they be even more usefull if I could apply them only to the parts of my image that need them instead of the whole darn thing? Bibble Pro 5 can do it. Aperture 3 can do it. Heck, Capture One Pro 6 can do it and it can even apply those effects to layers that can been named. Adobe invented layers and masks. Why cant I have them in Lightroom? Imagine non-destructive editing with no boundaries. Don't rely one your Monopoly with Photoshop's abilities to guaranty professional photographers loyalty. There are some nice options out there catered to photographers. Pretty soon we won't even need Photoshop. You will wan't to make sure that we still purchase Adobe by making Lightroom the best of the best.Its about time Lightroom steps it up. Adobe has the capability to make a truly amazing program to meet photographers needs.

Thank you.

PS Im not dogging Lightroom. I love lightroom. I'm just making suggestions base on a professional photographers needs.

[hillrg]

Another Photographer wrote:

I also would like to be able to apply highlight recovery selectively, but know not how to do it.  Any tricks (other than applying negative exposure selectively, which does not work for the reason stated)?

I do not expect an answer to these questions, but you never know.

I know exactly what you mean.  I frequently want to recover details and the highlight recovery does the job, but "flattens" the rest of the image, making it a little duller.  One thing you can try is to reduce the overall exposure until the area you want to recover looks okay, and then set a brush with an offsetting positive exposure to paint back in the underexposure.  Unfortunately the local brush exposure algorithm seems to work differently from the overall exposure, so you will have different contrast and you will need a different offset exposure, but it sometimes works.  This is pretty clunky, which just emphasizes the need for localized recovery.  Unfortunately, this really applies to every adjustment you can make in lightroom, hence all the requests for a true layers type implementation.

Here is an example where I ended up creating two files to send to photoshop from lightroom, one unchanged and one with the recovery for a white highlight on the bluebird's "hip" area.  I blended them in photoshop.  The file with the recovery made the rest of the bluebird significantly duller.  I could improve it with increased saturation but I could not reproduce the original colour in the rest of the bluebird.

http://roryhill.zenfolio.com/img/v23/p953321593.jpg

[Another Photographer]

hillrg:  I have many bird photos that would benefit from exactly what you did there.  Nicely done!

[cfransw]

FYI    Layers as plugin ! Non destructive, have a read !

http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/layers

Interesting development.

[laser_shop]

I have Gimp 2 and Paint.net both which offer great masking and layering options. Personally a little disappointed Adobe didn't include these editing tools into LR as the rest of the software is good.

[laser_shop]

Josef, I can appreciate your your concerns about the missing features. They are basic requirements and I believe should be added at some stage. Gimp2 and Paint.net have ecellent masking and layering features and are free.