Clone/Heal Tool

Upon return from a shoot yesterday and viewing my images I discovered to my dismay :-( that my sensor had upwards of 30+ pieces of dust/debris. Perfectly clean sensor Saturday.....Sunday full of crap despite the fact no lens changes took place and the environment was dust free.



After wiping my eyes I suddenly remembered the Healing Tool and set about spotting these 30+ areas followed by pasting this action to the other 50 odd plus photographs. Further dismay, I discovered that all the other images had bloches on them where the cloning had been pasted. I could only come up with one theory and perhaps someone would be so kind as to either confirm this theory or advice me where or what I am doing wrong.



Imagine I take an image of a blue sky - a perfectly blue image - and then spot heal 30 odd dust areas evenly distributed across the image. My second image (of the same dimensions and for simplicities sake) is split 50/50 - the top half being blue and the bottom half being red. Would I be correct in thinking that by sampling from the original all blue sky image that when I paste this to the second image not only does the healing get pasted over but ALSO the source from which the healing was picked. In other words, I now get blue spots all over the red part of the second image. This is what appears to have happenedd to my images - my source image contained a lot of sky, and subsequent images contained a lot of trees. When I spotted the first image with a lot of repairs to the blue areas, when pasted to the other images the trees were full of blue cloned areas.



Am I doing something drastically wrong here and does the cloning and pasting to subsequent images only work when their perspectives are the same? Hope I've made this all clear. :-)
Clone/Heal Tool
Try using the heal tool and syncing or copyimg using the ''previous'' that works ok.
Clone/Heal Tool
Geoff



Thanks for the reply. Perhaps I didn't explain myself too clearly or use the correct terminology but I have been doing as you describe. What appears to be happening (hopefully a little more clearly this time) is that when healing a predominantley blue sky image I am sampling from blue areas spread randomly around the entire image. When I then sync this to the remainding images it would appear that the sampling point (in this case blue) is also being synced to the remaining images. The end result and effect is that my sampling points (blue) are appearing as blue on the other synced images so for example I have appearing a blue sampling point from the first image appearing in green areas (trees) on subsequent images.



If it should work as you describe it would mean that LR is only remembering healed locations (not referenced healing points) and then syncing only those points over to subsequent images replacing areas of dust with whatever lies beneath the dust point on those images.

It doesn't sample from the first image, but it does sample from the same *place* as the first image. This was discussed in pod cast 29. They'd like to get each sync'd image to auto-search for the right place but it's not in there yet.

The OPs problem may then be a bug.



Don



Don Ricklin, MacBook 1.83Ghz Duo 2 Core running 10.4.9 %26amp; Win XP, Pentax *ist D

http://donricklin.blogspot.com/

Pod cast 29 explains the problems associated with syncing the healing tool, which at the moment is non-functional.



As dust can move on the sensor from frame to frame even slightly, it will be nice when the auto search function is applied. Then this will really be a powerful tool.

Here is a 'blue sky' image that I took this morning to locate exactly where all the dust was:



http://community.dcmag.co.uk/photos/alan_inghams_gallery/images/410477/original. aspx



using LR's Heal tool I spotted all this debris and then using Sync applied it to this image:



http://community.dcmag.co.uk/photos/alan_inghams_gallery/images/410899/original. aspx



You will notice that now all the yellow flowers have splodges of blue on them - the sample point from the first image. Surely this cannot be as intended???



Where do I locate Podcast 29 please?

No, it sure shouldn't do that.



http://idisk.mac.com/george_jardine-Public?view=web



3/16 is pod cast 29.

Thanks Lee - I didn't think it should do that either. :-( Has this, or will this, be reported as a bug? As it stands at the moment it would appear that this feature is a non runner and next to useless.



Thanks also for the link - will now go have a listen.

Ok, here's the dealeo...



LR 1.0 went GM BEFORE Camera Raw 4.0 went GM...in Camera Raw 4.0 GM, the behavior of the spot healing is to auto-source (automatically ''guess'' at a good source) a spot on an image by image basis as long as the source has not been manually moved. Which means, in CR 4, syncing spot healing with multiple images will allow an image by image auto-source selection. If you auto-source and then move the source, syncing will use the manually moved source.



In LR 1.0, the auto-source is based upon the location of the original auto-sourced spot.



It is hoped this will be addressed in the future...

But Jeff, how did it get the blue in an image that has no blue to get? It's as though it not only used the *location* of the original source, but the image as well. How the heck...???

Don't know...

From the original post:



%26gt;My second image (of the same dimensions and for simplicities sake) is split 50/50 - the top half being blue and the bottom half being red.



from a subsequent post:



%26gt;What appears to be happening (hopefully a little more clearly this time) is that when healing a predominantley blue sky image I am sampling from blue areas spread randomly around the entire image.



If you switch On Clone/Heal on the second image then click the circle for each heal point the actual source point within that image will be shown. My guess is that your random source points on the original image transpose to areas that are in fact also blue on on your second image.



Edit:



The moral here is that if you're going to use random and/or distant sample points then you should only use sync with similar type images.

Perhaps I misunderstood. I thought it was using its own generated sample points on the original image, which would tend to come from very close to the healing point, at least in my experience with the tool. Then those were sync'd to the second image.

Thanks for all the input guys.



Ian - what do you mean by ''similar'' type images? No two images are ever going to be similar unless of course you are doing 'burst' shooting. You also stated that ''......your random source points on the original image transpose to areas that are in fact also blue on your second image''. There are however, no blue points on the second image - it's all yellows and greens.



Jeff - it's not often, in fact I can't remember a single instance, where you have said ''don't know'' :-) I seem to recall you had the same sort of problem on your trip down south with a sensor full of dust - even more so than mine. Did you do image by image healing or did you use the sync function? I can't image that all your images were of 'similar type' as Ian is suggesting?

Alan, as Lee said it is not meant to do that and in fact it doesn't on my system (iMac G5 OSX 4.9), that is it behaves as expected.

So what system are you using?

Geoff



Windows XP Home (Desktop) and Windows XP Pro (Laptop) although it would be my guess that this Tool should funtion the same whichever OS one had.



Interestingly, I have just watched again the LR tutorial by Jeff Schewe and Michael Reichmann - Develop 3of3 - Spot Healing. In that video tutorial Jeff went to great lengths to explain that as this was Metadata editing and not pixel editing (as in Photoshop) it was possible to sync the 'spotting' to other images. He demonstrated this function quite nicely using images of Penquins on the ice-flow and more dramatically still, of what I am guessing to be a pink/blue sea where he 'spotted' goodness knows how many dust spots and then synced this to other images of the shoot. It must be said however, that the images were ''similar'' in content and from this (and other replies to this thread) I am assuming that this Spot Healing tool and the ability to Sync is perhaps not the ''Golden Saviour'' to us photographers as perhaps we first thought. Where the images are 'similar' as in Jeffs blue/pink sea this ability to sync works just fine. Where the images are completely different as in my examples (link in previous post) the ability to sync spotting does not apply.



It would be nice to hear from one of the ''Techies'' who designed LR whether or not it was ever intended that one could Heal multiple dust spots as in my first image (see link in previous post) and then sync this to all other images of the shoot regardless of tone/image content. I can live with the answer in whichever direction it goes - it would just be nice to hear a definitive answer one way or the other.

Alan, can you email me the files and I will have a go and see what happens:

service@villageimage.co.nz

Geoff



Thanks - they should now be in your 'Inbox' :-)

''It would be nice to hear from one of the ''Techies'' who designed LR whether or not it was ever intended that one could Heal multiple dust spots as in my first imageIt would be nice to hear from one of the ''Techies'' who designed LR whether or not it was ever intended that one could Heal multiple dust spots as in my first image''



Asked and answered...yes, that is the intent and design...but LR 1.0 didn't get the advantage of per image auto-source selection...Camera Raw 4 did...



If the image is close enough, syncing the spot healin in LR works great....but at this point, the more different the synced to images are from the original, the less good it is.



It is hoped this will be fixed...you know...in the future.

Ok - once again thanks Jeff. I must have misread or not fully understood your last reply regarding this.



As I'm not YET the user of CS3 (I don't like beta versions and in all honesty wouldn't be knowledgeable enough in its use to contribute to the feedback constructively) I am assuming that at present CS3 would be able to do this function better. CS3 does have Camera Raw 4 yes ?

Yes.

Thanks

Thanks Alan for the files.

Have emailed you with the results.

Good news is it is not you or your system as I can replicate.

I will report on the testers forum as a bug

.We will await some response from the LR team.



Weird !!!!!!!!!!!!!

Deleted post.

Can we please keep comments on ''where'' you reported an issue out of this forum, thank you!

Geoff



Thanks for your efforts. At least I'm happy to learn that it's not just me or my incompetence :-)



Just checked my email - nothing as yet.

Sorry Ian.......