More data... Remove interface concerns between Lr & Ps by, within Lr, writing image's ACR settings to image's xmp sidecar file and then opened that RAW file using Photoshop's Open ... as a result, fiile opens directly into Ps' ACR. Rendering problem shows. I then simply converted and opened image in Ps, and, sure enough, same rendering difference/error is there. Then copied RAW+xmp & TIFF "Export..." image files to my laptop and opened using same v20170425.r.252 x64 version of Photoshop ... RAW+xmp rendering looks correct to my discerning eye! When I compared it to Photoshop's TIFF file rendering, I saw an extremely small brightness difference in shadows and, sure enough, performing a difference comparison using layers & extreme curves enhancement showed some difference. But I'm going to ignore this for the time being and focus on the fact that the laptop's ACR rendering is essentially correct, and assume therefore that there is something odd with my desktop Photoshop installation/configuration. Laptop's Creative Cloud app then notified me that Photoshop needed updating, but not ACR ... so updated laptop's Ps and it now reports same v20170425.r.252 x64 version as before, so don't know what the update did. Anyway, then performed same as above by opening RAW and TIFF versions. Same results as above: So also going to ignore this version strangeness. So, the big finding here is that my Laptop's Photoshop basically renders the RAW+xmp file correctly. And I believe that I have also ruled out Lightroom as a factor. I am leaning toward removing and reinstalling my desktop's Photoshop and ACR, but I hesitate since I'd like to figure out what's going on before I brute-force fix it (it's the engineer in me).
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