# Problems with Adjustment Brush



## Swanlady (Oct 3, 2013)

My adjustment brush does not work.  Flow and density are both 100%.  It works fine on my laptop but not on my desktop.  The masking feature works fine, when when I click it off and then try to make the localized adjustment, the whole photo changes.


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## Victoria Bampton (Oct 4, 2013)

Hi Swanlady, welcome to the forum!

So when you say the masking feature works fine, you mean you can paint the mask and see it in red if you press the O key to see the overlay?

What do you mean you click it off then try to make the localized adjustment?  You understand that the mask still needs to be selected when you adjust the sliders?  

It sounds like you're turning off the brush and then adjusting sliders in the Basic panel rather than those in the Adjustment Brush Options panel.


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## Swanlady (Oct 5, 2013)

Thank you for answering Victoria.  I think I wasn't clear.  I can use the mask overlay and see the pink places I have painted.    Then I try to make the localized adjustment I want to make, and the whole photo changes.  This happens whether or not I click off the mask.  I can click off the mask with my laptop and then make localized changes, but not on my desktop.  I'm not clicking "done" on the bottom right .  when you say "the mask still needs to be selected when you adjust the sliders" do you mean the pink still has to be on the screen?  When I leave the painted mask on the screen, the whole photo still changes.


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## Victoria Bampton (Oct 7, 2013)

You can turn the pink off by pressing the O key, but the little white pin still needs to have the little black dot in the middle.


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## Swanlady (Oct 8, 2013)

Thank you.  The white pin has a black dot in the middle, but entire photo changes.  I think this must be something simple but I am totally stumped.  I know how to turn off and on the pink by pressing "O" or by checking or unchecking the mask overlay box.


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## Jim Wilde (Oct 8, 2013)

I wonder if it's possible that you're actually using the sliders in the Basic panel, which of course apply global changes, not local? One can collapse and hide all the sliders (apart from the brush setting sliders) in the Adjustment Brush panel and so use the global Basic panel sliders in error. This is how the right-hand panel looks in a "normal" setup, with the Adjustment Brush sliders visible:



And this is how it looks with the Adjustment Brush sliders collapsed:



May be a complete red herring, but worth checking maybe?


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## Swanlady (Oct 9, 2013)

I think you may be on to something.  I HAVE been using the sliders in the basic panel.  But I don't seem to be able to see the adjustment panel sliders.  How do I get those to show?  How do I make the adjustment panel sliders visible? I guess that is the missing piece.  You are so smart!


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## Jim Wilde (Oct 9, 2013)

It's not easy to see, but there's a small arrow to the right of the "Effect" box, see the attached screenshot. Click on it and all should be revealed!


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## Swanlady (Oct 10, 2013)

wow!  problem solved.  You are correct---I didn't see that tiny little arrow!  Let me ask you one more question.  I see that you use 12 GB of memory.  I use 8 but Lightroom is acting very tempermental these days.  Do you think I should upgrade to more RAM?


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## Jim Wilde (Oct 10, 2013)

Glad it's all sorted. The Lightroom UI has lots of ways to trip us up, unfortunately.

Regarding the RAM, to be honest I wouldn't have thought going up from 8gb would make a huge difference in performance (not as much as say going from 4gb to 8gb). A lot depends, though, on what else you might be running at the same time as Lightroom.....if you have something like Photoshop active at the same time, plus other things like browsers, mail, music, etc., then yes you may benefit from increasing the RAM, but how much might depend on other things. It'll also depend as well on what Lightroom functions you are running when it starts to act "very temperamental", and how fast is your CPU, and how your disks are organised. Getting Lightroom to run consistently well can be quite a struggle on some systems (even very high-powered systems), and it normally isn't a matter of fixing just one thing.

Tell us a bit more about your setup and we'll try to provide more focused advice.


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## Hal P Anderson (Oct 10, 2013)

And tell us what "temperamental" means in this context. 

Hal


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