Image soft LRC after editing in Photoshop

Hang on. Maybe I misunderstood a bit - I thought you said it was soft in Photoshop, but you said it was soft in Lightroom.

In that case it could be that Lightroom's preview rendering is "hanging" and takes longer than usual to snap into focus. That should be virtually instant, but sometimes it isn't. I haven't seen that here, but I've heard about it. This is basically a GPU issue, but it could be that the OS plays a part in it, especially if the image is loaded from the Library Previews.

In Lightroom there's a difference between the Develop and Library modules. Develop renders directly from the raw/image data, while Library builds jpeg Adobe RGB previews that are stored separately in a Previews folder. So do you see this in both Library and Develop?

My point is that there may well be some GPU/Windows 11 issue or differences in screen resampling. That can happen for a lot of reasons. The file itself doesn't change.

But when you view at 100%, there is no screen resampling. Each individual pixel in the image is represented by exactly one physical screen pixel. You see the image exactly as it is, pixel for pixel.

So what you're saying is that Windows 11 actually goes into the file and alters the pixel values in the image. There's no way an operating system can ever do this.

100% has nothing to do with print size or screen size or any other size. It's all about 1:1 pixel for pixel.

The image was saved as  a TIFF, not a aggressively compressed JPEG.

As I said, the issue ended up being Windows 11

I don't have this issue in Windows 10

Either you have not viewed at 100%, or the image has been resampled.

Or it has been very aggressively jpeg-compressed, which will alter pixel values permanently. In a non-destructive format like PSD or TIFF this cannot possibly happen.

Hi D Fosse, yes I have viewed at 100% and the issue persists with no editting on either program.

I reverted back to Windows 10 and it cured the problem.

You need to view at 100% to compare. This represents one image pixel by exactly one physical screen pixel. It's the only way to see the image accurately.

Images don't "soften" all by themselves - unless it's resampled or filtered. An image pixel is an image pixel.

Zoomed out, it's resampled on screen. Screen resampling algorithms vary in different applications. It's done in the GPU, so buggy GPU drivers could affect the result. All of this is avoided and bypassed by viewing at 100%.