P: Bleeding color with Healing Tool

[paminaewing]

I updated to 9.3 this morning. Healing aspect of spot removal tool now has bleeding in many previously edited pictures which did not previously have bleeding -- what was before a clean background with spots removed now has ugly bleeding of color, and I can't use the healing tool properly in new edits either -- bleeds result.   What can I do to fix this -- I am pretty concerned, this has affected many photos.  Thanks.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Lately, I am getting different (poor) behavior when using the spot removal tool in heal mode on the edge of an un-cropped image.

For example: if I have a mostly black edge of an image (say, a groom's black tux jacket), with a little bit of white along one small portion of the edge (say, a crease in the jacket and I can see a little bit of white wall behind the jacket), if I spot-remove the white, formerly it would completely wipe the white out, leaving only black (or shades of black, if you will).  But lately it's acting as if I'm not surrounding the entire white area with my spot, and leaving some white blurry bleed in the healed area. Doesn't matter if I define a smaller heal area that's just beyond the white area, or a huge heal area that's far beyond it... circular or un-circular spots... and no matter where I move the sample area around.

I just started noticing it in the past day, but it may have been around longer.  It's happened on multiple images, in different situations, and I have been careful to make sure the image is not cropped or lens-corrected or transformed... so I'm definitely not picking up any area/white outside of the visible edge.  It never used to do this, so I believe it's likely a bug.

[tpnotes]

I have recently noticed a similar behaviour with a cropped image. I have tried to remove a small dark spot on a nearly white background near the edge of a crop. I was absolutely sure that the area outside the crop was of the same white color and texture as the background of the crop. No matter what I tried I always got a kind of dark shadow in the healed area. 

I was surprised about this since I have not noticed such a poor behaviour of the spot removal tool for quite a while.

[COBill]

I concur, having the same problem and thought it was just me. Playing with feathering sometimes helps a little but doesn't clear up the issue. For me, definitely new with 9.2. 
 
Perhaps it is time to start a movement to get Adobe to revert Lightroom to 9.1 as 9.2 is a terribly buggy release? 

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

You can revert to 9.1 if you want to, just click the arrow next to the Open button and select from Other Versions.

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

Any chance of some screenshots so we can see exactly what you mean?

[COBill]

On Windows, the only Open button with an arrow is Open Recent and that only gives the option to open a recently used catalog. 

[tpnotes]

I assume Victoria means the open button in the Creative Cloud App.

[tpnotes]

I have attached two screenshots showing the effect for the edge of an UNcropped image.

Spot removal tool was set to healing, feather = 0 and opacity = 100. These settings have led to the "best" results. Changing the size of the spot removal tool has no effect.

(I use Lightroom with the German localization, so I hope I have guessed the proper English terms)

[Jerry Syder]

This is the expected(not desired) behaviour of using the heal tool in an area to the edge that's cropped(you'd get the same result if it's uncropped). What heal is doing is trying to blend tones and textures in the area. Although you can't see the leaves in the cropped area, it is there so LR tries to blend it. The only thing that won't do that is 'Clone' which is what you need to use in these instances.

[Todd Shaner]

you'd get the same result if it's uncropped

If the image is uncropped Heal should remove the tree branches.

*tpnotes said, "have attached two screenshots showing the effect for the edge of an UNcropped image.
 I suggest uploading the original image file to Dropbox or other file sharing site.

[drtonyb]

Is the problem related to having the Lens Correction option Enable Profile Correction turned on?

I noticed that having lens profile correction on actually 'crops' the edge, but the spot removal tool acts as though it is working on the image data before the lens correction is applied.

Here is an example of spot removal of a leaf that appears on the edge of a lens profile corrected image. The before and after shows how much the lens profile has 'cropped' the edge.



Clicking on the leaf with the spot removal tool in heal mode and moving the sample point results in a smudge.



I think the smudge is due to Lr blending with part of the leaf that is 'outside' the lens corrected image, but 'inside' the original image boundary. Turning the lens profile correction off shows this more clearly.



This has always been a problem with cropped images, but I didn't realise it is also a problem with lens profile corrected images!

I've argued in the past about this problem in cropped images where the spot removal on the edge of a cropped image can sample and blend with image data outside the crop boundary, which is often undesired. Here we have the same problem, except the crop is less obvious.

Tony

[tpnotes]

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/help/enhanced-spot-removal.html

"Heal Matches the texture, lighting, and shading of the sampled area to the selected area."

I am no native speaker, but for me "match" and "blend" are describing different behaviours.

[tpnotes]

I am using a MFT-Lens/-Body (Olympus). So, yes - lens correction is enabled (built-in), but I have no option in Lightroom to disable it.

I remember that Lightroom should no longer use samples from outside the cropped area for the spot removal tool, but I do not remember where and when I have read that.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

As I clearly mentioned, this is an UN-cropped image, with NO lens corrections enabled or transformations, so my particular issue has nothing to do with any of those scenarios. 

I've been using Lr professionally on a near-daily basis for over 10 years, and while it could've been me or some odd situation with the few particular images (but being as it was more than one image I don't think that's the case)... it was definitely behaving differently lately than it used to, so not the expected or usual behavior at all, so I thought I'd raise the issue.

Strangely, I just tried to reproduce it to get some screen shots but couldn't.  So maybe it was something odd going on with my computer or me.  🙂  But as I mentioned the image had an all-black edge (a groom's tux jacket standing partially out of frame), except for a little sliver area of white.  I tried to remove the white area, sampling with my spot far beyond the white, far into the black.  In the past it would completely remove 100% of the white, leaving only black, but when I raised the issue it was leaving behind some white.  No matter where I sampled, how far into the black my spot was, how big or small it was, etc.

BTW, again it wasn't my issue in this case, but I do agree with Tony that it would be great if Lr treated the edge of a cropped image as if it were the actual edge of the image, as far as spot healing goes.  There's been countless times when I've had to un-crop an image before I heal, then re-crop it.  Not a huge deal, but would be nice...

[Todd Shaner]

As best I can tell the frame edge Spot Removal Heal behavior isn't something new. It sounds like this should be designated as an 'Idea.' Add a checkbox in the Spot Removal panel named 'Constrain to image' or something like that.

[drtonyb]

I agree Todd, I'm always in favour of giving the user more control and a 'Constrain to image' option on Spot removal would be just such control.

The frame edge spot removal in heal mode problem has been raised before:

https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/spot-removal-in-heal-mode-doesnt-work-properl...

https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/latest-lr-buggy-spot-removal-tool-doesnt-work...

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Can you post an example image showing the effect you are describing?

[Just Shoot Me]

As above a screen shot of what you are seeing on your screen would help to solve your problem.

[drtonyb]

I'm extremely disappointed in the Lr development team for releasing LrC 9.3 without having fixed this issue.

 Here's a screen shot of my example.



Here is the result of LrC 9.3 Spot Removal in Heal mode to remove my artificial spots, including the tree branches in the lower left corner.



For comparison, here is the same removal using Lr 9.2.1



Now, as pointed out in this post, many users will have their images ruined by this newly introduced bug.

Unfortunately, there is little that can be done except revert back to Lr 9.2.1, which is not what paying customers expect to have to do.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Do you see the same issue in Adobe Camera Raw or is it happening only in Lightroom Classic?

[paminaewing]

I don't use camera raw, and I have now reverted to the prior version of Lightroom since so many of my pictures were affected by this bleeding.  I hope Adobe will fix this problem soon so I can restore the update.  

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

@pamina Ewing @anthony Blackett -  can you provide me a raw sample + settings that shows the problem?

[paminaewing]

Like I said, I already reverted to version 9.2.  The problem described in detail above by Anthony is identical to what I experienced with version 9.3.  fyi the bleeding with healing tool was very similar to the bleeding you get when a picture is cropped and you use the healing tool on the edge of the frame.  When I made the effort to use healing tool to brush over the area OUTSIDE the frame with uncropped picture in 9.3, as I would do with cropped pictures in prior versions, this would solve the bleeding issue.  This suggests to me that the problem may be that there are pixels outside the uncropped picture in version 9.3.  The bleeding only seems to occur on edges, which also supports this theory.  I have a 16-inch Mac laptop if this could be relevant.  

[drtonyb]

Hi Rikk,

Here is a link to my example. It's a jpg with settings written to the file. Just import into LrC 9.3, switch to Develop and enable the Spot Removal tool.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/5wi3suostq1jwkf/DSC_0191b.jpg?dl=0

If you do the same with Lr 9.2.1, you will see a very different result.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Thanks. I have the file.