Lightroom2.5 - squirrelly healing brush

[nemophoto]

Is it just me, or is the healing brush within Lightroom incredibly slow and squirrelly? By comparison to the same tool within ACR, the Lightroom tool is a real dog on my system. I'll click an area and sometimes wait, literally, 5-8 seconds. If I drag the healing circle to a specific spot, it sometimes takes even longer. I'll let go of the mouse button and wait forever for Lightroom to "release" it. I thought the basic engine was the same between the two programs?

Also, no matter how I try, I can't seem to figure out how to properly adjust the white point in Lightroom. (Black point seems a comparative no-brainer.) 8 times out of 10, I have to do that adjustment in Photoshop. I'm trying to reduce my post-production work and do as much as possible in Lightroom. The exposure slider basically does that, but not without a lot of additional work then with almost all the other sliders.

Finally, is there a work around for using the mouse wheel to adjust values of sliders? In an earlier version (I think 2.0 and 2.1), you could use the mouse wheel to incrementally adjust values, rather than type in a value or rely upon imprecise mouse movement. Adobe took that away, for some very bizarre reason, but I thought someone might have discovered something "hidden" like "shift-wheel".      

Thanks, Nemo

[NikoJorj]

Is it just me, or is the healing brush within Lightroom incredibly slow and squirrelly?

Didn't experience it... but that reminds me of a weird software incompatibility I did experience, with a wacom tablet and the handwriting recognition routine that threw a mess in the adjustment brush haptic. There might be something comparable in your way?

Also, no matter how I try, I can't seem to figure out how to properly adjust the white point in Lightroom.

If you really do search for an equivalent of the levels command, there may not be any in LR (but I find the LR controls to be much more useful in the end, YMMV).

Finally, is there a work around for using the mouse wheel to adjust values of sliders?

Click the wheel while you're hovering on the slider, and turn it while keeping it clicked. Much more easier to do than to explain (at least if your mouse wheel is clickable).

[Ed Blagden]

I don't have precisely the same problem, but there seems to be a close correlation between my use of the brush and LR crashing on me... i.e. it only seems to happen when I am using the brush.  That said, the problem seems to be less in 2.5 than it was with 2.4

IKTDH.

Ed

[rdonson]

Nemo,

Have you optimized the catalog lately?  In 2.x that helps me.  Also, long LR 2.x edit sessions seem to promote sluggish behavior on my machine.  Perhaps there's a memory leak.  I have to periodically shut down and restart LR when I notice the sluggishness.

LR 3 beta doesn't seem to have the same problems for me.

[nemophoto]

Thanks for all the suggestions. Yes, my mouse is clickable, so I'll try that. As for optimizing the catalog, I haven't tried that, though generally, no catalog is terribly large, since I use a separate catalog for each major project. It probably IS a memory leak, of which Adobe products are horrible. Just last night, I had to restart Lightroom twice, and Photoshop no less that five times (partially because plug-ins would no longer run), and reboot my system once. That seems to be a problem regardless of Mac or PC. My wife is on a Mac and is constantly having to restart InDesign and Photoshop.

I've had the same weird performance with my Wacom tablet at times, so that could be part of the problem.

Where my Lightroom 2.5 crashes most frequently is using the gradient tool. Probably one out of three times causes a crash. I haven't tried the Beta, but at this point I'll probably wait till the release, since I don't want to convert the catalogs. You'd think they'd come out with some sort of backward compatibility, but no. Adobe likes to lock you into going forwards and rarely look back. The only program you can save to an earlier version of theirs is Illustrator. Thankfully, they don't have much control over TIFFs or JPEGs and they've kept PSDs compatible.

[andyptak]

It could be the video card - LR has some issues with many NVIDIA cards, while PS or ACR do not.

[nemophoto]

You could be right about the video. In general, I've found some buggy issues recently with the nVidia cards. I actually bought a Asus Radeon 4890 card, which is suppose to have excellent performance. The only problem is, though I have a 550 watt power supply, it crashes my computer on boot up. So, I basically have to rebuild my computer (for a few other reasons as well) before I can update my graphics.