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

[descender]

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.

[descender]

The next day, after a reboot of the workstation, I am not sure if I can reproduce this. I fired up Photoshop and opened the same working file, a PSD with my image in a smart object, and attempted to reproduce the same problem.

While I was working on this, I noticed that Scrubby Zoom was disabled, which alerted me that the latest PS update must have reset some preferences or changed the relationship with the graphics card. Either that or something that the tech support representative tried in last night's remote desktop session. He did try disabling and then re-enabling GPU acceleration and had me restart PS after that, but at the time we did not find any obvious improvement.

In any case, today I found Scrubby Zoom disabled and I saw no reason why it should be greyed out, so I turned some advanced GPU performance settings off and back on, then closed Photoshop and restarted it. Scrubby Zoom is working properly now and I am not seeing the Camera Raw problem described in my initial report.

One intermediate hypothesis I had was based on the fact that I discovered the checkbox for "30-bit display" was enabled in Advanced performance (GPU) preferences. I'm pretty sure I never set that on my own, so maybe it accidentally got set as a result of the recent updates? However, checking or unchecking that setting and then clicking "OK" to exit Preferences did not make the problem reappear, or any other visible difference. Anyway, regardless of what really solved it, the problem seems to be gone after a PS restart, at the same time as having Scrubby Zoom properly enabled again.

I can only conclude that something went wrong in the OpenGL communication between Adobe tools and my Windows 10 system, don't know what else to say. Maybe this post will prevent someone else from being too disturbed if they see the same problem that I did.

[April_W]

When I right-click on the file in Lightroom, and choose to "Edit in Photoshop", it opens in Photoshop with different colors. I cannot figure out how to revert back to the old version of ACR. The only thing I've been able to do as a workaround is to open the DNG file from Photoshop directly. From there, it opens the file in Camera Raw for me to confirm the adjustments, which are the same adjustments I made in LR, and then it opens the file in Photoshop. But if I right-click on the file in Lightroom, and choose to "Edit in Photoshop", it opens in Photoshop with different colors. Please help!

[ssprengel]

I am running PS 2018/ACR 10.3 and LR CC Classic 7.3, and things seem to open consistently from LR to PS.

I'm using an sRGB-gamut as opposed to a wide-gamut monitor on Windows 10.  I have calibrated my monitor with Windows 10.

Can you characterize what "different colors" means? 

Do you have the GPU enabled in PS, ACR and LR?

Have you made any adjustments in your video card control panel applet, that might change how one app works vs another?

Here is what my NVidia Control Panel looks like:

[descender]

@April_W, interesting... the problem you're seeing sounds very much related to my issue, and yet I don't have the same exact trouble that you described. When I right-click an image in Lightroom and open it for editing in PS (either regularly or as a smart object), I do not see any change in its appearance, unlike what you described. Mine opens fine when I do that... but then if I go to apply the Camera Raw filter to the image from within PS, that's when (in the Camera Raw display while it's open for settings adjustment) I see everything looking wrong.

Meanwhile, when I go to open a .DNG directly into Photoshop, in the initial pop-up where I am viewing the .DNG file in the Camera Raw window, it looks horribly wrong... blacks extremely clipped and contrast all out of whack, though colors seem correct. Then when I finish and click the button to go ahead and open all the way into Photoshop, the image looks correct as it should.

When operating in PS and applying Camera Raw as a filter, after I make any settings adjustments in the filter and close it, the image does not retain the problems that I saw in the CR filter display. So it's only a display issue *while* the CR filter is open for adjustments.

[maxwyss]

I don't know whether it is relevant here, but with the update to Camera RAW plug-in 10.3, we found that the Workflow options (that's what you access via the active element looking like a hyperlink below the image) got set back to the factory settings (which means Adobe RGB 1998, 8 bit). This setting defines how the image is opened in the plug-in, and if you are used to something like ProPhoto RGB, 16 bit, there is a visible difference.

You might check whether this setting is still correct.

[ssprengel]

Maybe I'm going about it wrong, but I'm not seeing the ACR workflow options being reset to Adobe RGB on the way into PS.

I tested by having LR send PPRGB and turned on all the profile-mismatch warnings when opening images into PS, and got a warning about the opened document having a PPRGB profile while the working space was sRGB, which is consistent with how I have LR and PS settings.

[descender]

@maxwyss, the problem I'm seeing seems like it would be entirely consistent with what you just described. When I am in PS, working on a smart object, and I go to open Camera Raw as a new Smart Filter applied to the object, when Camera Raw opens it's clear that I am seeing my image either through a different color space, or in some other transformation that causes the blacks to be clipped a lot -- plus other changes in the brightness/contrast response that are not as easy to describe as the very obvious clipped blacks. The colors/hues themselves don't appear too much different, but the brightness and contrast are way different as though a curve were applied (or just an incorrect color space, maybe).

I am familiar with that Workflow Options setting you describe, seems like a few years back I used to see that when I was taking an image from LR into PS, but now for a long time I have never seen those options at the bottom of the screen during any phase of my workflow. I know that long ago I switched from "Edit with Photoshop" to "Edit as a Smart Object in Photoshop", but I just tested now and that doesn't affect whether those workflow options show up. I just don't know where to access that anymore, can't find it. I recall very clearly how that was where I long ago set my preference for always using ProPhoto RGB in my editing process, though of course I render out sRGB final files for most purposes.

The only place I currently seem to find what might be the same setting is in Lightroom > Edit Preferences > External Editing > Color Space. But I find that is still set to ProPhoto RGB as I've always had it. So that does not explain the problem I'm seeing. But also strange is that the text in that preferences window describes that setting as applying when taking an image out of LR into PS. It doesn't say anything about being already in PS and then opening Camera Raw as a filter.

This is driving my a little crazy -- my entire photo processing workflow is heavily affected by this since the Camera Raw filter is by far my preferred method of doing some final whites and blacks tweaking, minor last-step masked sharpening, and other finishing touches, after anything else I do in PS.

[descender]

@maxwyss, incidentally, April_W's mention of opening a .DNG directly into Photoshop was the missing place that I had lost, where the Workflow Options settings can be found. I did that, and looked at them, and my Workflow Options are ProPhoto RGB as they have been for years, 16 bit, no resize or sharpening. So in my case, nothing seems to have been changed in that particular area by the Camera Raw update. And that is frustrating, because that would so perfectly have explained the ill effects I'm seeing.