Camera Raw 10.3.0.933 (update released about 3-4 April 2018) -- problems?

Hi. This post is mainly about Camera Raw when used as a plugin in Photoshop, but if my fears are correct it may apply just as well to Camera Raw in its role as the main processing engine of Lightroom.

You can find your Camera Raw version in Photoshop by clicking Help > About Plugin > Camera Raw, to determine whether this post may have anything to do with what's going on in your own setup.

The issue:

* Before this CR update, if you applied CR as a smart filter on a smart object in PS, merely applying it, opening the filter dialogue, would change nothing whatsoever about your image. Nothing at all would be altered, at least not visibly, until you actually began to move any of the control sliders in the CR filter/plugin.

* After this CR update, merely applying Filter > Camera Raw immediately does something to your image, even before you change anything in the filter at all.

To reproduce: use any photograph; or to match my situation, use an outdoor landscape photograph with a fairly wide (but not clipped) dynamic range. Open it as a Smart Object in PS, or open in PS then convert to a smart object. The smart object aspect of this may not be a part of the issue, but it's just how I normally work so we might as well follow through with it. Once you've got your image as a smart object, go to Filter > Camera Raw and select it. You should immediately see something similar to the following visible changes to the image:
- the blacks are suddenly somewhat clipped
- the mid-brights have lost a lot of contrast, gone 'flat'

By chance, this update was when Adobe introduced a pretty major new feature addition: Camera Raw now comes with a large number of "profiles" that can be used in place of what used to be far fewer choices. We used to choose between "Adobe Standard" and either "Embedded", or a range of (often around five) profiles that are associated with our specific make and model of camera. For my Pentax k-5, this translated to only Adobe Standard vs. Embedded. For my friend's more recent Sony camera, his images would have a choice between Adobe Standard and a bunch like "Camera Vivid", "Camera Neutral", "Camera Landscape", "Camera Standard".

So in this CR update we now have many more of these "profiles" to choose from, and that's surely a good thing. ** BUT ** it feels as if there is no true neutral... I have a hunch that CR is applying some kind of curve or profile to the image even when every control is zeroed or set to default or the most basic setting -- and when the curves section is set to "Linear".

My typical workflow is to grade and group and tag and choose images in Lightroom, then make minor initial adjustments in Lightroom, then open as a Smart Object into PS. I will then optionally use some Nik Efex tools, sometimes the Raw Presharpener instead of LR/CR's sharpening; sometimes a few of Nik's Color Efex filters very lightly applied, mostly with the goal of adjusting contrast without over-saturating. After returning from the Nik window, I will sometimes want access to Camera Raw controls at this stage, rather than going back and altering the original smart object, so I will apply Camera Raw as a filter at this point and have this new chance to very slightly pull up the shadows or adjust the black and white point, or maybe just a percent or two of dehaze or a smidgen of final vibrance.

Well, that used to work just fine, with no problems. And it is completely ruined now -- because the moment I open Camera Raw as a filter in Photoshop my image is already messed up and I didn't even adjust anything in the filter. Alarmingly, there is now a "profile" setting at the very top of the Camera Raw filter's front page/tab of controls, and there is no setting for it that does not visibly affect the image. Even the mildest setting still looks as if a tone curve is being applied, even when the Tone Curve section of Camera Raw is set to Linear.

In case there is some new set of defaults stuck in Camera Raw just since the update -- in other words, just in case I need to actually take action to force it to work neutrally, I have poked around throughout CR to make sure nothing is anything other than zeroed and linear.

I started a ticket for this issue; sorry, I don't have the ticket number because I did not save the transcript, in case anyone from the tech support side reads this. But I will have it when they contact me tomorrow. The issue was escalated to some degree after an initial remote desktop session with support personnel.

Finally, I will add that the first-level tech support person took a look at disabling video card acceleration in PS's Camera Raw preferences, but that made no difference to the issue. Know also that I have a good quality 4K Dell monitor with no other outstanding issues, and that I keep it calibrated monthly and have had good color and brightness fidelity as a result. I have not recalibrated it since the Camera Raw update just the past two days, but since calibration is done entirely outside of Adobe I would not expect that to matter here.

Message was edited by: Eric Ongerth only for clarity in one sentence in the final paragraph.