Inspiring

Answered

PS or ACR filter subject mask on a lossless PNG?

Forum|Forum|22 days ago
May 10, 2026
7 replies
79 views

I'm using the latest PS/ACR version on a Windows 11 laptop.

I extracted two lossless PNG files from different 4K (30 FPS) videos taken with the same camera - Nikon P1100.

The first image was a bird with a blue sky background. I edited the bird with an ACR filter subject mask and did a surprisingly good job of lifting shadows, as well as some other minor slider tweaks. A few more PS tweaks, and the jpg was ready to go.

The second image was a bird with a marsh and woods background. I used an ACR filter subject mask and darkened the bird without performing any background masking. However, as soon as I exited the ACR filter session with the change and returned to PS, the background was badly muted, so I had to abandon that edit and make subject mask tweaks in PS.

Two questions. First - why was the background muted in the second image? Second - for future edits with lossless PNG files extracted from videos, is it best to attempt ACR filter subject mask tweaks, or just do them in PS?

Correct answer Mark37430984r9lw

ChatGPT solved the issue for me, so, I’m marking my reply as the correct answer. I don’t pretend to understand this, but it worked. Here is the solution and ChatGPT’s explanation:

The PNG frames extracted from 4K video were not standard sRGB; Photoshop showed them as Rec. ITU-R BT.709 Display Full 1-1-0-1 under Assign Profile.

When I ran Camera Raw Filter on those PNGs, the ACR preview looked correct, but after clicking OK and returning to Photoshop, the background/sky appeared muted, even with no meaningful edits applied. It looks like a color-management/profile handoff issue between Photoshop and Camera Raw Filter when working with PNG frames using that Rec.709 display profile.

The fix was not Assign Profile. The fix was:

Edit → Convert to Profile → sRGB IEC61966-2.1

After converting the PNG to sRGB first, Camera Raw Filter returned to Photoshop normally and the background no longer muted.

M

Mark37430984r9lwAuthor

Inspiring

I can’t figure out how to edit my second reply, but perhaps Videolan’s (“lossless”) new file from the source caused problems.

D Fosse

Community Expert

@Mark37430984r9lw

Ok, so it was the profile, as I suspected from the start. This is apparently encoded to the broadcast variety of Rec.709, which uses a limited range that maps black to value 16, and white to value 235, to avoid clipping in a typical TV. Digital video by contrast uses the full range from 0 to 255.

I suggested assigning a profile in case it was missing altogether. If there is a profile, you convert.

M

Mark37430984r9lwAuthor

Inspiring

Ty - I’m looking back now at your original reply which indeed asked me to look at the color profile. Please understand that while I’m getting much better at editing RAW files, I know little else about the Adobe editing suite universe and had no idea what a color profile was. Nonetheless, I could have saved time and aggravation had I paid more attention to it in the first place instead of assuming you weren’t on the right path. 😄

M

Mark37430984r9lwAuthor

Inspiring

Adding a second reply. Digging into this, I suspect that maybe my FFmpeg lossless frame extraction method may have given me files with the wrong information, and perhaps I should have used a different line:

"%FFMPEG%" -i "%INPUT_FILE%" -vsync 0 -vf "scale=in_range=pc:out_range=pc" -compression_level 0 "%OUTPUT_DIR%\vid2_frame_%%06d.png

I first tried probing the source MP4 (where I had extracted PNF files from) which was originally from my P1100, then reencoded (to get rid of dead time) a loserless file with VideoPad Video Editor which stripped metadata in the new file, since I probed and saw this:

color_range=unknown
color_space=unknown
color_transfer=unknown
color_primaries=unknown

I then probed a video straight out of the camera and saw this:

color_range=pc
color_space=bt709
color_transfer=bt709
color_primaries=bt709

I’d love to continue this thread to learn more, but for the future, I’ll be bypassing Videolan and just trimming videos with FFmpeg, and I assume will not have to assign new profiles to extracted PNGs, but I’ll find out.

M

Mark37430984r9lwAuthorCorrect answer

Inspiring

ChatGPT solved the issue for me, so, I’m marking my reply as the correct answer. I don’t pretend to understand this, but it worked. Here is the solution and ChatGPT’s explanation:

The PNG frames extracted from 4K video were not standard sRGB; Photoshop showed them as Rec. ITU-R BT.709 Display Full 1-1-0-1 under Assign Profile.

When I ran Camera Raw Filter on those PNGs, the ACR preview looked correct, but after clicking OK and returning to Photoshop, the background/sky appeared muted, even with no meaningful edits applied. It looks like a color-management/profile handoff issue between Photoshop and Camera Raw Filter when working with PNG frames using that Rec.709 display profile.

The fix was not Assign Profile. The fix was:

Edit → Convert to Profile → sRGB IEC61966-2.1

After converting the PNG to sRGB first, Camera Raw Filter returned to Photoshop normally and the background no longer muted.

Conrad_C

Community Expert

I don’t have an answer for the main question, but for this part…

…for future edits with lossless PNG files extracted from videos, is it best to attempt ACR filter subject mask tweaks, or just do them in PS?

…as an alternative, recent Photoshop updates might make it less necessary to do these edits in ACR. I understand if the Camera Raw filter was opened to get at the subject masking and maybe some of the better correction controls that Photoshop doesn’t have, but recent versions of Photoshop added some formerly Camera Raw-only features such as:

Select Subject
Object Selection tool (for when Select Subject doesn’t select what you want)
Temperature and Tint (in the Color and Vibrance adjustment layer)
Clarity and Dehaze adjustment layer

I do understand wanting to edit in the Camera Raw filter if you want to use options such as Highlights and Shadows, which still work better in Camera Raw than in Photoshop.

D Fosse

Community Expert

I simply cannot replicate this. Here’s just one of the times I tried:

Now, I’m no big fan of automated masking, so this isn’t something I do a lot, but I tried to follow your procedure as far as you described it, using Subject Mask in the ACR Filter. The screenshot is a PSD, but I tried PNG too.

I’d be more inclined to look at system parameters.

does your image have an embedded color profile and which is it?
Is your monitor profile made with a calibrator, or are you using a manufacturer profile shipped through Windows Update? (a bad monitor profile can cause incorrect display in some applications but not others)
What GPU are you using? (the GPU is heavily involved in several aspects here, both processing and color management)
and again - have you compared at 100% view? The screenshots you posted are not at 100%.

M

Mark37430984r9lwAuthor

Inspiring

See the attachments - these are not screen shots. These are not monitor views. They are the final product. Original.jpg was produced by saving the original PNG as is. Muted jog was produced from th4 same original PNG - filter - camera raw filter - mask - subject -exp -.20. Open - save.

Again, if I make no subject mask tweaks, the background is still muted.

M

Mark37430984r9lwAuthor

Inspiring

This us 100% reproducible. See the attached originalsnip.png which is a screengrab of the original PNG that is too large to attach here. I open it in Photoshop - filter - camera raw filter - subject mask - I darkened the bird. The mutedgrab.png isn’t great for displaying the problem, but on my big screen, it does show the background was muted at that point. So, I then save the jpg -see the attached muted.jpg. The bird is darkened, but the background is muted. I get the same muted background if I save a jpg without making any subject mask changes.

Up until yesterday, I’d only used PS/ACR or RAW files, and this is my first time editing a PNG.

What the heck is going on, and how do I resolve it.

Ty

D Fosse

Community Expert

Obviously there’s not supposed to be any visual change going from one to the other. No pixel values are altered just by sending the image to another application. So the obvious first question is - is there an embedded color profile (icc profile) in this image? If not, you need to assign one. Otherwise, it’s all to the wind.

The second explanation that comes to mind is that you have a very noisy image, and you’re not comparing at 100% view. 100% in a pixel editor has nothing to do with size - it means one image pixel is represented by exactly one screen pixel.

All adjustment and blending previews are calculated on the on-screen image. If zoomed out, the resampling introduces intermediate pixel values that aren’t really there in the full data. So when the adjustment is executed on the full pixel data, it may appear to change - but in reality, the result is correct, it was the preview that was wrong.

Comparing at 100% avoids all this and gives you a true preview. So you need to post examples (crops) taken at View > 100%.

Another possible gotcha - if you have layers - is that the ACR filter doesn’t work on a full layered composite. It works on the one specific layer you have selected. So things can change when returned to a layer stack.

M

Mark37430984r9lwAuthor

Inspiring

I’m rushed right now. Later in the day, I’ll send you both images to compare, as well as my complete workflow.

M

Mark37430984r9lwAuthor

Inspiring

For a better comparison, I saved the original as a jpg which fits here and will upload it side by side with the muted one. See my earlier continuation of the thread for my workflow.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded