Adjustment brush sometimes gives blotchy results

Question

I noticed this during the public beta of Lightroom 2 but figured either it was me or they'd fix it in the public release. Well, today I see the "problem" if it is a problem is still there, so perhaps it's me, in which case I'd be grateful for some help.
Here's the problem: The localized adjustment brush produces great results sometimes, and at other times, the results are so bad that I have no choice but to delete the mask and give up.
Hard to provide verbal examples, but I'll try to suggest what I see.
I have a photo that shows a couple of people water skiing on a lake. Photo was taken from the tow boat. Sun was a little behind the two skiers so their faces are somewhat in the shadows. I used the brush to increase exposure of their faces and the results were quite satisfactory. But when I tried to use a new brush to increase the exposure of the stand of trees and houses on the distant shore, the results were awful, especially when I zoomed in. The exposure was increased but there were ugly splotches of pixels throughout the masked area. And while there had been a wee bit of chromatic aberration visible in the line where the tree tops met the distant sky, after the brush was applied (with auto-mask ON), it was MUCH much worse.
Are there some guidelines about when the brush is a good idea and when it's not? Am I doing something wrong?
Thanks in advance,
Will

Answer 1

Joe Klien,
You obviously haven't worked with NX2 enough to even make a judgment on its advanced local corrections through a set of u_point tools, including a selection u-point, gradient, paintbrush, region mask defining tools, etc, in addition to the color u_points, all of which are certainly more flexible and faster with respect to workflow speed than the present basic paintbrush and gradient in LR2. LR is just getting into the non destructive local corrections area, so I'm sure LR3 will provide more advanced tools.
LR2 does run circles around NX2 in some respects, batch processing for example,just not at NEF conversion and editing, and LR2 is a cataloging program, whereas NX2 is browser based and strictly a NEF Raw processor--although it will do jpegs and tifs as well. NX2 is a specialized toolset designed to maximize the use of Nikon proprietary camera information and to edit its images. ( And, it finally has speed comparable to its competitors.)
Don't take my word for it, go to Moose Petersen's site and watch how a very well known pro uses NX2. He will give you a brief introduction to how quickly you can work with NX2 with a couple of basic uses. Watch his videos on NX2 at the bottom of the page.
By the way NX2 is completely non destructive editing, as it has been for years. It writes its metadata and changes back to the original NEF, which obviates the need for sidecars or DNG conversion. Here is a link for your convenience:
http://www.moosepeterson.com/D3/media_center.html#