Saturday, October 17th 2009

Spot removal tool in Lightroom 2 jumps and stutters

My mother in law had ~1500 scanned photos where she wanted dust spots removing. No problem I thought, that’s a pretty quick job in Lightroom.

I imported the photos, and got going with the Spot removal/clone/heal tool. It didn’t take long before I noticed that it stutters, jumps and lags endlessly, which makes it extremely frustrating and basically impossible to use.

I really think this should be considered a bug for the Lightroom team to fix.

I made a screencast to show you the issue:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtMX2zcLwmw&hl=sv&fs=1&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&hd=1]

All that jumping and stuttering you saw there was in Lightroom, not just because of the video/recording.

I’ve tried to find more information about this on the internet but without any real success. I guess it’s not a very common problem, or more people would be complaining. So I decided to post something about it, hoping to get responses from people who’ve noticed this too.

If you have seen this, leave a comment!

Edit: I seem to have found what’s causing this bug, and hence a workaround. The stuttering of the Spot Removal tool only appears when I have two monitors active in Windows. (The setting in Lightroom though makes no difference.)

Actually, that’s not quite true. Here’s what I should say: The stuttering goes away when I disable my second monitor in Windows. I have found the stuttering to reappear after a reboot, even though only one monitor is active. Really weird!!

Posted at 09:57. Categories: Lightroom, photography. Both comments and trackbacks are closed.

3 Responses to this post:

1. Izzybug says:

   November 15, 2009 at 04:10

   I have found the same problem. I do not have two monitors. It also lags, the arrow dissapears and can not find the mouse, and it creates endless beachballs. I don't use it often because I know It will take several minutes each click!

2. David Naylor says:

   November 15, 2009 at 07:46

   I feel your pain! It's so annoying! Sorry to hear my fix didn't work for you.

3. Elke says:

   January 7, 2010 at 22:54

   what I found with this tool is that I can't direct it…