PS or ACR filter subject mask on a lossless PNG?

Question

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?

D Fosse · Answer

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.

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