Damien Symonds

Start by running CleanMyMac. Then start purging and archiving.

Holy shit. This is bad. You really can't run Photoshop without 32GB of RAM these days. This is cata-bloody-strophic. You have to get that figure up to at least 150GB, pronto.

@Ang?

Can you do this for me?

Just one back.

You've got the very latest Photoshop update? Yes, it's like this for me too. It's an awful glitch, and I hope they fix it fast.

Well, just keep painting gently.

What do you think of it?

It's 10% by default I think.

Smoothing always 0, Flow always 100. They never vary. Opacity was 100% for the initial blob on her head, then I used 10% to expand it gently.

What do you think of this? https://max.mailbigfile.com/3fdaa29efe461e9de566bee975e31a7e/listFiles.php

The sand won't give a blackened effect like in your sample photo, but it's worth a try.

Yes, that might work too. Yes, the background. It would be best if you had a photo with the massive sun flare on their heads too; or else find a different example photo without it.

Yes, that might be better.

I WANT YOU TO FOLLOW GUIDELINE NUMBER THREE.

Please?

Guideline Number 3.

That's probably because there is no edit data in the xmp files. It sounds like you didn't have this turned on in LR? Three reasons to enable XMP files in Lightroom Classic - Photofocus

I'm not sure why it's not in your trash, sorry. That's exactly what it does on mine.

Yes. You need to free up a LOT of space on your hard drive.

Not enough to make a real-world difference.

Of course it's too noisy. You'll need to fix that in your raw processing as usual.

That one is excellent.

Yeah, that's very very bad. https://www.damiensymonds.net/art_tscs000.html