A

Anonymous

Question

Layers in Lightroom

Forum|Forum|15 years ago
December 9, 2010
9 replies
24294 views

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.

This topic has been closed for replies.

laser_shop

Participant

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.

laser_shop

Participant

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.

cfransw

Inspiring

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

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

Interesting development.

H

hillrg

Known Participant

Joseph, I believe this is an inherent design flaw in lightroom. There has been debate on this since the betas with no indication that adobe are interested in a true layer/masking solution. I have personally given up. I love lightroom but I'm going to take a serious look at Capture One.

Regards

Rory

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Another Photographer

Participating Frequently

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 am not an expert, I just like to make my images look better and the lack of layers and true masking prevent this quite often. Unfortunately, I am out of practice using PS because I've been leaning on LR far too long. I am afraid of moving to Bibble or Capture One or DXO because of fear of the unknown basically.

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

H

hillrg

Known Participant

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

David Ayars

Participating Frequently

Josef, I don't disagree with your request, but when you post in this forum, you're communicating with other Lightroom users in an area intended to help resolve technical issues. It's not an out-of-bounds topic for this forum, but the underlying "you people" inference, as if you're writing to Adobe employees, and expecting this to be an area for requesting features, indicates a misunderstanding. Most people who post in all of the Adobe forums (including feature requests) are users like you. An Adobe employee who responds will have the word "Employee" under his or her name. An Adobe employee probably will see what you post in the feature requests area, though, even if they don't respond.

J

JulioSene

Participant

If we compare Lightroom wiht CameraRAW we will see that develop module is a different interface for CameraRAW features. Other modules of Lightroom are very simple with many limitations and bugs. Example: try to create a jpg output using print module for more than one photo and Lightroom will create a folder with the images, but the name extensions will be separated by coma, not by point! This is a bug and still occurring in new version (LR 3.3). If Adobe didn’t solve a simple bug like it, is hard to believe that they will develop new features out of CameraRAW features. Is hard to believe that my iPhoto have better healing tool than LR. If you take photos of people, useful healing brush is very important to optimize your edition time. Talking about iPhoto (came for free on my iMac), this tool permit to create photo albums do print. Why LR doesn’t do it? Adobe needs to understand Lightroom as a complete tool for photographers and not as a different interface with the same CameraRAW features, because other players are improving their tools as fast as possible.

S

Samoreen

Inspiring

Hi,

Josef Kissinger wrote:
Adobe invented layers and masks. Why cant I have them in Lightroom?

Because Adobe would sell much less Photoshop upgrades. So they are not in a hurry.

--Patrick

L

Lee_Jay-ZyZk56

Participating Frequently

Samoreen wrote:
Hi,
Josef Kissinger wrote:
Adobe invented layers and masks. Why cant I have them in Lightroom?
Because Adobe would sell much less Photoshop upgrades. So they are not in a hurry.

That has nothing to do with it.

S

Samoreen

Inspiring

Hi,

Lee Jay wrote:

That has nothing to do with it.

If I had layers and masks (and therefore a selection tool) in LR and if LR had a true programming interface for plugins like Bibble or Photoshop, I for one would no longer need Photoshop. And I'm sure I'm not alone. In its current state, LR cannot be used for heavy retouching tasks that need controlled masking (LR's automasking is not enough) and sophisticated local image processing. Did you ever try to remove an unwanted object from an image in LR (just an example)?

I don't need the sophisticated graphical features of PS. If I could only have those that can help me for my photography tasks, LR would be enough. Bibble 5 has been mentioned in a previous message. Although it is far from being at the quality level of LR, Bibble Labs are moving at their own pace but they are enhancing the product. In my environment, there are photographers already using only BB5.

If you are telling us that LR has been designed in such a way that implementing layers and masks is impossible, I'm ready to believe you.

--Patrick

J

JulioSene

Participant

Josef, I agree with you! Lightroom is a fantastic tool for photographers, but developer module needs some improvements. I had already tested all of alternative tools that you mention to work with RAW images. You are right! Bibble 5 Pro has layers and permit free designed area selections, when Lightroom permit just circular areas. In my point of view, Lightroom developer module needs to be more than a different interface for CameraRAW. CameraRAW don’t need layers because is just a plugin for Photoshop and Photoshop have layers (and much more).

L

Lee_Jay-ZyZk56

Participating Frequently

Adjustment brushes met the highest priority needs in the time available. I find them remarkably flexible and haven't gone to PS for a single image since they became available except for two purposes - compositing and Focus Magic.

I'm not sure fill light and recovery make a lot of sense since they are already local corrections that create their own masks based on the image content.

A

Anonymous

I was just working on an image where I wanted to use highlight recovery on a white wedding dress. The problem is that it took the nice looking highlight sheen away from the staircase and foliage. It also made the overall image look flat because I had to drag the slider all the way to 100% to get the dress where I wanted it. You know what else it did? It left a huge halo around the groom's shirt where it was contrasted against his dark suit. How can you say that selective editing is not useful for highlight recovery. If any adjustment in lightroom is useful, it is obviously more useful if i can apply it selectively. That's like saying layer masks in photoshop are not useful because you can just add more adjustment points on the curve to prevent highlight clipping. Or what if there is a picture lit by flash that wasnt balanced properly so that the background was really warm but the person in the foreground had a correct color balance from the flash. If i could selectively edit the color balance by painting the background, wouldn't you think that would be useful? I can go down the list and describe every single instance where selectively editing would be useful for all of lightrooms adjustments. For example, don't you think it would be useful to only sharpen someone's eyes? Or maybe sharpen the whole image but leave the skin in a portrait softer? Why should I have to go to photoshop for these simple tasks? Photoshop should only be needed by designers, not photographers. Or what if i want to boost the saturation of a red bow in someone's hair but i don't want the red lips or cheeks to get any redder? Now imagine that the ribbon has green pokadots. What if i don't want the green to get any more saturated. The only way to accomplish this is if i could select the red channel and paint the ribbon with a saturation brush that only targets reds. I could come up with hundreds of scenarios. Multiply that by tens of thousands of photographers and you can see how useful selective editing is.

Its fine if you ran out of time before this release, but you cant say that its not useful. I wrote a similar request during lightroom 3's beta testing and a multitude of photographers aggreed with me.

A

AlanUniqueName

Participating Frequently

I totally agree with this request and although not mentioned I would include my desire to have some control of where noise reduction is applied within an image.

I hate the discontinuity of stepping outside LR for what I personally consider to be within the boundaries of needs for "photo development" and not crossing a line into being photo creative or compositing. In my view LR needs to seriously push at these boundaries as other packages are already looking attractive because they can do more non-destructively and seamlessly. In my opinion it will be a long term strategic error for Adobe to simply adopt the response line of "but that is pixel editing" or simply "use photoshop for that".

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