Trouble with Cloning in Lightroom 4 (Help Please!)

[2WheelPhoto]

I think the entire cloning situation in Lightroom is ridiculously poor...it's poorly,poorly implemented in multiple ways.

And honestly it would be so easy to set it up like photoshop. Smells like marketing and fears of product cannibalism from adobe.

Why would the put the same tools in a lesser, cheaper product? There has to be some reason to buy photoshop, right? LR was never designed for pixel level editing...

Yeah adobe wouldn't have much business sense if their LR4 and CS6 had the same purpose with the same functions.

But i want my Tundra pickup to accelerate and handle like a Lambo

 

[Rwsphotos]

A lot of thought and reserch needs to go in to buying your editing. There is no one program that will fit every ones bill. I personal use and love LR 4. Yes it is cheaper than cs but not lesser. It was made for photograpers to organize and adjust their raw settings quickly and effeciently. Now if you need that pixel editing to clone and such then LR is not fir you. Still leaves you a nice basket of choices depending on your needs. On top of LR 4 I also have Cs5 master suite, which only gets used for cloneing which I dont do but once in a blue moon and for removing my green screen when doing portraits. Choice of editing is up to you and your need.

 

[Rwsphotos]

Yeah adobe wouldn't have much business sense if their LR4 and CS6 had the same purpose with the same functions.

But i want my Tundra pickup to accelerate and handle like a Lambo

Lol yeah let me know when you find one that does and I trade my buick in on it ( grin)

 

[2WheelPhoto]

A lot of thought and reserch needs to go in to buying your editing. There is no one program that will fit every ones bill. I personal use and love LR 4. Yes it is cheaper than cs but not lesser. It was made for photograpers to organize and adjust their raw settings quickly and effeciently. Now if you need that pixel editing to clone and such then LR is not fir you. Still leaves you a nice basket of choices depending on your needs. On top of LR 4 I also have Cs5 master suite, which only gets used for cloning which I dont do but once in a blue moon and for removing my green screen when doing portraits. Choice of editing is up to you and your need.

+1, same here

 

[JAC526]

And honestly it would be so easy to set it up like photoshop. Smells like marketing and fears of product cannibalism from adobe.

Why would the put the same tools in a lesser, cheaper product? There has to be some reason to buy photoshop, right? LR was never designed for pixel level editing...

Yeah adobe wouldn't have much business sense if their LR4 and CS6 had the same purpose with the same functions.

But i want my Tundra pickup to accelerate and handle like a Lambo

I don't think a cloning tool makes LR into a lambo.

 

[2WheelPhoto]

Why would the put the same tools in a lesser, cheaper product? There has to be some reason to buy photoshop, right? LR was never designed for pixel level editing...

Yeah adobe wouldn't have much business sense if their LR4 and CS6 had the same purpose with the same functions.

But i want my Tundra pickup to accelerate and handle like a Lambo

I don't think a cloning tool makes LR into a lambo.

Yes sir, I agree but the cloning tool is not the only thing CS6 does either. But no matter what, software tools don't make a Lambo

 

[JAC526]

If only they did.

 

[JPmkV]

So after briefly messing around with the cloning tool on GIMP and a quick re-edit LR4 this is what I came up with...

Before:


After:


I could take more time and get it better. And after seeing the image blown up larger I noticed that the driver side mirror was overlapped with a clone. Anyway, just wanted to post up these before/after shots as a reference for anyone else having a similar issue. :thumbup:

 

[2WheelPhoto]

Edit looks great

 

[JPmkV]

And now that I look at it even more, the reedit after GIMP came out incredibly dull in comparison. I imported the original RAW file to GIMP, edited, then exported the image to LR as a jpeg. Should I do it differently to get a better quality image?

 

[KmH]

GIMP can't do Raw files, but I agree the car is very dull in the edit.

Try to avoid exporting to Lightroom as a JPEG. Lightroom's Develop module is a Raw converter and is optimized for images that have a 16-bit color depth. JPEGs only have an 8-bit color depth.

So if you can export to Lightroom as a 16-bit depth TIFF. Oops! IIRC GIMP can't do 16-bit depth.

FWIW.
In Photoshop the Clone tool, like most Photoshop tools, has many tool options available.
The Clone brush options include - tip size, shape, scattering, texture, roundness, hardness, spacing, blending mode, flow and opacity. There is a Clone tool airbrush feature.
There are also Clone Source options - like x/y coordinates, width, height, alignment, angle, opacity, darken, lighten, difference, overlay. Up to 5 different Clone Source options can be set.
Since Photoshop can do layers one can choose to sample all layers, the current layer, or the current and below layer.

 

[Scuba]

Wow! Thank you everyone for all your input! I am disappointed that Lightroom's cloning tool doesn't work for things like this, but I'm glad it wasn't me just being ignorant. Looks like my best option at the moment is to go with the GIMP program until I have the means to get PS.
Thanks again everyone! :thumbup:

Did you try what I suggested in LR?

 

[JPmkV]

Did you try what I suggested in LR?

Yes actually. I just went back and tried again. This time I used much smaller clones, and a lot more of them! :thumbup::mrgreen:

Here are the results, and I must admit, they came out pretty darn good!

Showing all the clones:

And the finished product!


Thank you sir! :thumbup::thumbup:

 

[pic_chick]

All these edits look good but..... vignette was added before you guys did the clone work. some of the cloning pulled the darker area further into the image giving it an hourglass like shape around the car that odd.

 

[JPmkV]

All these edits look good but..... vignette was added before you guys did the clone work. some of the cloning pulled the darker area further into the image giving it an hourglass like shape around the car that odd.

In the last edit the vignette was added after all cloning was done. In fact any and all editing was done after the cloning process.