How to undo Lightroom adjustment brush on all photos?

Question

I accidentally applied the adjustment brush from one photo to over 100 of them by copying the development sessions. It was quite early on in the editing process and couldn't fix it by using undo.

I was trying to find a way to remove the brush edits from all photos at once but couldn't figure it out or find the answer on the internet.

I tried by removing the brush edits one one photo and copied and pasted the settings onto the others but it didn't copy the removed brush (I guess it only copies over new edits and doesn't remove them).

In the end I gave up and reset all the images, costing me about 2hrs of my time.

Answer 1

For each picture "A", you could have come back at its original state, duplicate it to create image "B". Then go back to the last edition step of "A" and copy only the changes you want (CTRL + SHIFT + C) and past them to "B" (CTRL+SHIFT+V).

It's a one by one process but it works.

Now a "batch" process is more complicated but doable if you are familiar with text file manipulation (using any langage you want).

One way to do it would be to use the XMP sidecar files. A XMP file is associated each image and contains a "copy" of (almost) all the changes you made to the image. It's a copy of what is stored in the Lightroom's catalog. XMP files aren't enabled by default (but it's always a good idea to activate it).

As a XMP file is in the XML format, it's human readable. Here is what I would do :

1. Save a version of the XMP files as backup in an other folder
2. Find how are saved Lightroom brush corrections the XML files
3. Delete all of the occurence of those corrections in the XML files (regex)
4. Import the new image's changes to Lightroom