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Author Topic: how do I select the bottom brush with duplicate brushes.  (Read 3259 times)

Wayne Fox

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how do I select the bottom brush with duplicate brushes.
« on: March 28, 2016, 05:23:55 pm »

I’ve been searching for this for a while with no luck.  I’ve tried every keystroke combo I can think of (hopefully there’s one I haven’t).

I have an adjustment brush which has some pretty serious masking at edges.  I want to create a second brush to increase the effect and allow some of the effect to extend into other areas, so the second brush is larger.  The two brushes must remain perfectly stacked to retain the crisp edge from auto masking one portion when creating it.

I can’t figure out how to select the “bottom” brush to tweak the adjustment.
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Slobodan Blagojevic

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Re: how do I select the bottom brush with duplicate brushes.
« Reply #1 on: March 28, 2016, 08:45:31 pm »

How did you create the second brush? You couldn't position it on top of the first one outright (if I understand correctly, they have to be perfectly aligned on top of each other, right?).

Here is what I would do: create the second brush in the vicinity of the first, then grab it and position it on top of the first. When you want to fiddle with the first, grab the top (second) one and movie it away, adjust the first, then grab and position the second back to its place. Sounds more complicated to describe than do.

fdisilvestro

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Re: how do I select the bottom brush with duplicate brushes.
« Reply #2 on: March 28, 2016, 10:25:30 pm »

If you right-click on top of an adjustment brush pin you get a contextual menu with the option to duplicate the brush. This creates a clone of the previous brush that sits exactly on top of the previous one, duplicating the effect (you can edit this later)

As Wayne mentions, there seems to be no way to select the brush that is underneath, besides moving the one that is on top first, as Slobodan suggests. Since the only option to move the brush seems to be to drag it with the mouse, it is almos impossible to achieve perfect alignment on top of the previous brush once you moved it. The brushes do not "snap" on top of other brushes and there is no relation between brushes (like parent-child) even when duplicating one.

Having said that, the exact coordinates of the brushes are saved in the catalog and/or the xmp files, so in theory it would not be difficult to implement the functionality to snap brushes. In any case, I doubt that this will get enough priority at Adobe.

Because the data can be stored in a xmp file, it is possible to reposition a brush in the exact location as it was before by editing the data directly in the xmp file (not something I would recommend doing as a routine). I was able to achieve exactly what Wayne needed:
- Cloned an adjustment brush,
- then moved the new brush to be able to select the original one
- edit the original adjustment brush
- reposition the cloned brush exactly on top of the original one by editing the xmp data.

Schewe

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Re: how do I select the bottom brush with duplicate brushes.
« Reply #3 on: March 28, 2016, 11:49:27 pm »

In any case, I doubt that this will get enough priority at Adobe.

Actually I wouldn't be so sure of that. I've talked with Eric Chan about the need to be able to select the pin stack. He agrees and the more that people talk about it the more likely it will get fixed for both Camera Raw and Lightroom.
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BAB

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Re: how do I select the bottom brush with duplicate brushes.
« Reply #4 on: March 29, 2016, 10:19:15 am »

Maybe u could convince him to also give us the ability to change the color of the path line in PS?
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Rory

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Re: how do I select the bottom brush with duplicate brushes.
« Reply #5 on: March 29, 2016, 11:11:31 am »

Actually I wouldn't be so sure of that. I've talked with Eric Chan about the need to be able to select the pin stack. He agrees and the more that people talk about it the more likely it will get fixed for both Camera Raw and Lightroom.

That's good to hear.  You do have to wonder about the way things are going at Adobe though.  If you give the user the ability to create a pin but not to subsequently edit it later you clearly have not thought it through.  I also wonder about the write in campaigns necessary to get things fixed.  If it is broken, just fix the darn thing.  Unless we are talking importing of course.
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Wayne Fox

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Re: how do I select the bottom brush with duplicate brushes.
« Reply #6 on: March 29, 2016, 01:42:43 pm »

I appreciate the feedback, I finally gave up, so glad I quit banging my head against the wall looking for something that wasn’t there.  I’ll look into modifying the brush position in the .xmp file.

That's good to hear.  You do have to wonder about the way things are going at Adobe though.  If you give the user the ability to create a pin but not to subsequently edit it later you clearly have not thought it through.


considering this is the first time I’ve had this problem and I can find no talk of it via searching, it seems a pretty simple oversight, and with Jeff for mentioning this to Eric (thx) I’m confident it will be addressed.  The duplicate brush ability probably wasn’t designed with what I’m trying to do, and I’ve used it many times, but this is the first time I’ve had the need to edit the bottom brush after creating one on top.  I need to pull some of the adjustment out of the bottom brush so the two brushes equal each other, but the top brush extends the adjustment to areas under the brush. I think the LR team is pretty responsive for most issues, (the only one that seems to remain broken and I’m not sure why is LR opening a copy of Photoshop  that is in another location other than the same application folder as the lightroom application.  That one still puzzles me).

I solved the problem by just making the second brush not overlap the first, a little bit more work.
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adias

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Re: how do I select the bottom brush with duplicate brushes.
« Reply #7 on: March 29, 2016, 02:29:27 pm »

Actually I wouldn't be so sure of that. I've talked with Eric Chan about the need to be able to select the pin stack. He agrees and the more that people talk about it the more likely it will get fixed for both Camera Raw and Lightroom.

That is a good idea.
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Rand47

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Re: how do I select the bottom brush with duplicate brushes.
« Reply #8 on: April 12, 2016, 01:19:17 am »

Actually I wouldn't be so sure of that. I've talked with Eric Chan about the need to be able to select the pin stack. He agrees and the more that people talk about it the more likely it will get fixed for both Camera Raw and Lightroom.

Cool... Any discussion of numbering or labels?

Rand
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