Adjustment Brush randomly won't work?

Tara

Can I ask a lightroom question here or is there a better place? Thanks.

I've been having this issue for ages! All of a sudden the adjustment brush won't work and then will work. I have no idea what I might be doing to cause this. I've tried selecting new, I've tried selecting a preset adjustment brush, checked density and flow of brush, I'm not on erase. When I ask to show Mask Overlay nothing shows up either. Then all of a sudden on a new photo - it will work again? I shut the computer down opened up and it worked again too??? Then on the next photo it didn't. This is incredibly frustrating.

Thanks
Tara

Msmoto

Flow and density near zero will do it, and there is a situation where moving the brush back and forth will change these as well.

Make certain to reset all your brush settings when you bring up a new brush;

kanuck

Yes resetting will work Msmoto is correct. I had the same problem with the clone stamp in Adobe CC. Not sure why it occurs, but I think it might be RAM related in my case. Lightroom is usually error free compared to photoshop I find especially when this problem is concerned...

kanuck

@kanuck: it's not an error. If you press the 1 - 0 keys when using a brush or clone stamp in photoshop, you'll change the opacity from 10% up to 100%. The same is true of flow in Lightroom. It's actually very convenient.

With regards to the clone stamp, I could not even set a value for the tool nor could I choose a region to copy from. Resetting the tool was the only way to solve this issue for me.

Maybe 1 in every 10 times running CC, when I drag my B&W sliders they would slide back themselves to their preset values. The same thing would occur if I type in the values. It gets to be super annoying and if you don't reset the tool it will continue doing this. I had the same problem with 5.1 Extended as well. I used to set the value I wanted, then after it reverted itself back to the preset I would click the auto button and it would go back to the value I wanted for each color in the B&W adjustment. Resetting the tool luckily did the trick with this problem as well after I did some YouTube video searching...

spraynpray

We could do with some more info or feedback from you @Tara. It could be something like you have already applied a global adjustment that has used up all the adjustment you have so the brush is ineffective. What I mean is for example you have applied full shadows recovery to an image then want to selectively apply some more via the brush (or grad filter or whatever), then you will find it does not 'seem' to work.

Msmoto

Has the OP left us?

One other possibility, the large files of the D800 series bodies when shooting in RAW, do on occasion get Lightroom overwhelmed. This seems to occur after maybe 15 or 20 different brushes have been used, and something gets behind in the processing.

One more thought, on some MacBooks produced in late 2011, there is a known graphics card issue, the good news being Apple will repair this at no charge.

kanuck

I think you are right MSmoto its a D800 thing most likely. You really need a minimum of 16GB of RAM and a Nvidia type 800+ graphics card otherwise Adobe performances really slow to 6pm rush hour traffic....