Please, oh please, add a simple liquify or warp tool to the Q panel! Wedding photographers adore Lightroom, but round-tripping 1500 photos over to CC just to give errant armpits and dress straps a five-second cleanup is an enormous bog. Lightroom, I love you. This is all I ask to make my world complete. Please, we beg of you, let us move some pixels!
I completely agree - liquify in Lightroom and the clone stamp would be amazing! I know that there is the clone and heal but it is no where near as good as the photoshop version.
Adding liquify to Lightroom would save me a TON of time. Most of the time, I just need to slim an arm or two here and there. It would also save a bunch of disk space and allow me to keep my library in DNG format.
Lightroom feature request: Liquify! It's the only thing I take photos into CS for anymore. If I had a little liquify adjustment brush in LR, my life would be complete.
PLEASE! I have been requesting a Liquify Tool in Lightroom for YEARS! I am a pro, mainly shooting Boudoir, been an Adobe customer for 10+ years. The only thing I have ever asked for is this feature. It would save soooo much time! Like just now when I tried to batch open 15 images from Lightroom to Photoshop, just to nip & tuck with the Liquify tool, and crashed my computer. Lost a LOT of time troubleshooting with Tech support. Please ADOBE, I give you a LOT of my money. I know there are thousands of others who want this too. Please listen to your customers and give us what we NEED!
I really really really wish there was a Liquify Tool inside LR Classic CC. For the life of me, it simply doesn't make any sense that this extremely useful tool is not present in LR still after all these versions. When batching hundreds of photos (Wedding Photographers have been asking this for years), it's insane to have to open so many photos inside PS only to do minor Liquify touch-ups.
I just don't understand why it's still not present in LR.
Well, it's not in there because probably only very few people want it in there, wedding photographers being a small percent of the total LR user base (and probably not all wedding photographers need it). In all my years of reading this forum, I have never seen anyone express an interest in having liquefy in Lightroom.
Also, please note that LR struggles with local adjustments on some hardware, I'm sure liquefy would be similar, or worse.
I'm not the smartest when it comes to Lightroom. However, I know that Lightroom is a nondestructive editing tool. The master image is never modified, and my thinking is that the liquefy tool would require pixel modification. That is something that it seems to me is where Photoshop would be required.
I am not a Wedding Photographer myself, and I certainly could use the Liquify Tool. I produce a lot of content for the web, and this tool would be extremely useful directly in LR. It would speed up the processing of the photos a LOT.
About Non-Destructive raw images, LR already does local modifications that will require pixels change, like the healing brush. I don't see why previews could not show Liquify modifications, and then apply that to the final exported image. Other Raw Editors are already offering that tool, surely it is possible.
"surely it is possible" is not the issue, and not debatable, yes it is possible. The issue, as always, is: does Adobe want to do this? I think that answer is clear as well, based on Adobe's modifications to Lightroom so far, they do not want to do this.
Eleven people have voted for it in the past five years, making it one of the less popular requests.
I highly doubt that the majority of LR users are represented on those feature request votes... I'm pretty sure the majority of people don't even know there is a feature request forum where people can go vote for tools and features.
The feedback forum gives a rough indication of how different feature requests compare in popularity. Users get directed there from many different sources: this forum and many other third-party forums, Adobe customer support, Adobe Web site and social media. Indeed most users don't know the feedback forum exists, but it still gives a useful sampling of user opinion.
For comparison, here are the the ten most popular requests from the last 8 years:
Adobe would probably be fine adding Liquify. But it's never that simple, and it's never just because of user demand. These are my words only and not Adobe's, but the way these things tend to work is that Liquify isn't in there yet because:
Spot Healing is already notoriously slow when you add a lot of it to an image. Probably because of the requirement to render it from raw. But Liquify requires even more calculation than spot healing because it's freeform deformation, more complicated than a lens correction deformation or a regular warp mesh (like Wave Warp or Fisheye Warp in Photoshop). There's probably a lot of potential for Liquify to be very slow in Lightroom. So Adobe may not want to add it until they can make it work fast enough on raw files. Liquify in Photoshop doesn't need to involve the additional raw rendering step.
Liquify isn't the only great idea to add to Lightroom. Even if Liquify was obvious and popular, it needs to fight its way past the long list of other potential features to add, which are evaluated on a wide range of criteria that we as users may or may not be thinking about (long term strategic direction, competitors' features, mobile compatibility…).
So the question isn't just "can it be done" or "Photoshop does it so it's done." The question is "Can it be done with acceptable performance on raw files, and is it more important than the other stuff in the new feature queue?" The fact that we haven't seen Liquify yet doesn't mean it'll never happen, but every time Adobe evaluates candidates for new features, Liquify will always be going up against those other candidates. It could be a while before it makes the cut for an upcoming new version, or it might never make it if it's always beaten by other competing potential features.
Conrad is right. There is no way that Adobe could program a liquify tool in the raw pipeline in Lightroom/ACR that would have even remotely useful performance without completely redoing the imaging pipeline to work completely differently. You just have to look at the not very good performance of spot healing and brushes in Lightroom. Liquify would have to work in a very similar manner but with way more complex math.
I hear what you guys are saying. All I know however is I've seen it in other applications, so, clearly it is possible. Surely there would be a way to apply it to a preview image and use the preview image as cache instead of having to re-render all the calculations every time from the raw to display the liquify. As a matter of fact, I would venture and say I don't understand why Healing Brush is still slow in 2019 and why they haven't figured out yet a workaround involving preview images.
For instance, here's a solution I'm thinking off the top of my head: If Liquify would be too intensive on the current Raw rendering architecture, then they could add the tool as a "LAST EDIT TOOL". Meaning, once all your calibrations are done with LR Tools, then you could use the Liquify Tool. Once you start using it, the tool would be applied on a preview image of the rendered raw. That preview is already rendered, since we already see an image with our tool modifications. So basically, as soon as you start using the Liquify Tool, LR could create a VIRTUAL COPY of your image on which we apply the Liquify. At least it would save us all the time it takes to render the raw to TIF towards PS, then opening the Liquify tool, then saving back.
That's just an idea of a possibility. I'm sure there would be other ways to include Liquify in a streamlined fashion in LR.
Just curious, which other raw editing applications have a Liquify-like tool?
I was under the impression ACDSEE supported that feature. I just installed the trial, and noticed that in order to use the Liquify tool, it renders the image into its own editing app, then saves it back.
I thought ON1 was doing it, but it doesn't seem to do it yet.
Well, it appears it is not an easy thing to implement after all in a RAW editing platform like LR. However, I would still be happy with an in-between solution where a render would be created within LR, so that I wouldn't have to launch PS, then launch the Liquify Tool, with every single photo. I'm sure there would be a way to do this.
Anyhow, I understand not everyone is hot on having a Liquify toll within LR... But I'm one of them, and it certainly would make my life much easier if that tool was present.
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