Colour in ACR different from Bridge, PS, LR

[TomBPhoto]

Hi All, seem to be in a bad run of luck with my set up this week! 

I'm getting inconsistent colours from ACR, higher saturation than in Bridge previews, photoshop and Lightroom. Bridge, PS and Lightroom all look the same, if there are any differences between those three they are subtle enough that I've not spotted them.

Last time I had a similar issue to this it was a monitor calibration issue. I've re-calibrated, set to defaults, removed old profiles, but still encounter this issue.
I didn't change anything in PS prior to discovering this, other than GPU performance settings as I've encountered a crash issue there also. Not sure if these are related.

usually, the most obvious difference to spot is on the legs, where the saturation is already very high. hopefully the included screen captures show the issue. I've tried my best to keep the images the same size to avoid any other colour shifts. 

I typically do all my colour and tone work in ACR so other than moving over to LR, is there anything that can be done to get ACR to match the rest? 

LR is 12.2

PS is 24.2.0

Br is 13.0.2.636

Any help would be greatly appreciated! 

ACR vs PS - miss



Bridge vs PS - match


ACR vs PS - miss


LR vs ACR - miss

 LR vs PS - match

[TheDigitalDog]

Short answer: Part of this is a Bridge issue and the color space of its previews. Been discussed in the past. LR/ACR and Photoshop, all correct. You might make a post in the Bridge forum about this. 

The other thing to do is examine how your display profile is being created. Do not use Version 4 (V4) spec display profiles, only V2. 

Lastly you must compare all previews at 1:1 (100% zoom) as they all subsample a bit differently. Previews in Lightroom Classic must be done this way in Develop module (other modules use a different preview architecture).

[TomBPhoto]

Hi @TheDigitalDog I'm a little confused by your answer, as Bridge, Lr and Ps all display the same and its ACR which is the odd one out, if that makes sense?

[TheDigitalDog]

I've found Bridge previews don't match depending on the color space of the original images. I believe the previews are a smaller color gamut than what is viewed in LR's Develop module. 

ACR, LR and PS should all match IF you view at 1:1 aside from the possible glitch with V4 ICC display profiles. 

You could try disabling GPU in Adobe Camera Raw preferences too, but usually a GPU issue makes the previews look really strange. 

[TomBPhoto]

Hi @TheDigitalDog I still don't think bridge is being a problem here, but one of your suggestions has certainly found a work around!  The profile I'm using is a V2 and the below captures are all at 1:1, showing the bottom left of one of my shots. 

ACR - GPU on vs PS - Miss


ACR - GPU OFF vs PS - Match!







Lastly here is what it looks like when PS is proofing to monitor RGB and ACR is set to GPU on. Could this be indicating that there is an issue with the way that ACR is seeing the colour profile? 

Obviously for the meantime I'm going to have to run ACR with the GPU off and deal with some clunky zooming and panning. But at least it looks like we've identified the issue.

[TheDigitalDog]

If turning OFF the GPU works, it's a GPU bug, and you need to contact the manufacturer or find out if there's an updated driver for it. This is why disabling GPU is an option as more and more functionality moves to the GPU in newer versions of many Adobe products.

Also see: 

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/lightroom-gpu-faq.html

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/photoshop-cc-gpu-card-faq.html

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/acr-gpu-faq.html

Disable third-party graphics accelerators. Third-party GPU overclocking utilities and haxies aren't supported.

[TomBPhoto]

Hi @TheDigitalDog Don't think I'm experiencing any bugs with this GPU, I've had it for many years and no other program has any stability issues. This seems bound to ACR. 

I saw something pretty interesting though, the histogram is changed when the gpu is either on or off. 

Somewhere ACR is choosing to render the image differently, and to be changing the histogram ACR must know this too. All the settings on the image are identical, only gpu support is turned either on or off. How can this be?

[TheDigitalDog]

Hi @TheDigitalDog Don't think I'm experiencing any bugs with this GPU, I've had it for many years and no other program has any stability issues. This seems bound to ACR. 

I saw something pretty interesting though, the histogram is changed when the gpu is either on or off. 

By @TomBPhoto

Yes, that's the behavior of a GPU bug. 

Again: This is why disabling GPU is an option as more and more functionality moves to the GPU in newer versions of many Adobe products. 

[D Fosse]

Yes, clearly a GPU issue affecting ACR but not the others. Display color management is performed in the GPU nowadays (the actual conversion from document to monitor profile). What happens here is apparently that the GPU just sends sRGB numbers directly to screen, without converting/remapping into the monitor profile.

This is confirmed by the fact that proofing to Monitor RGB in Photoshop gives the same result. That turns off display color management and just passes the document RGB numbers directly to screen.

This is an old-ish GPU (although it should still work and be supported), but the first thing to do is to update the driver. Install the studio driver, not the game ready driver, and check "clean install" to remove the old driver completely. Don't install the extra components in the driver package; you don't need them. Just install the base driver.

BTW - is this by any chance a laptop with external display? In that scenario it can happen that one or more applications are using the wrong monitor profile - i.e. the profile for the laptop screen is used when the app is actually sitting on the external screen. This only happens on machines with an integrated display, so it has something to do with how displays are assigned in the GPU/OS.

[TomBPhoto]

Hi @D Fosse thanks for the driver advice, I'll try that!

And this is a desktop with just 1 external display and no integrated graphics either. 

[TomBPhoto]

@D Fosse I was unfortunately not able to use a studio driver, there does not seem to be any available for the card i'm using.

I did roll back to ACR 14.5 though and this has fixed the issue. 

Below is ACR 14.5 at 100% and PS at 100%. ACR is using the GPU for image processing and open and save. It all works fine.

So I don't have any further options with drivers on this particular GPU and the only solution so far, apart from turning gpu off in the latest ACR is to use the previous version. 

Thoughts?

[D Fosse]

You can try to uncheck the top two levels of GPU usage here:

(although I suspect they will already be unchecked).

At present, I don't think you lose a lot of basic functionality with GPU disabled in ACR. Enhance/super resolution most likely, maybe a few other things. In Photoshop the impact would be much bigger.

The problem is that more and more functions are moved to the GPU, and you will inevitably fall further and further behind.

[David Franzen at Work · Accepted solution]

I think this is a known issue with the the HDR Output (HDRO) technology preview on Windows in 15.2. I see the "HDR" button in some of the screenshots showing the problem. The bug occurs when the tech preview is on even when Camera Raw is displaying SDR images.

To see if the HDR Output tech preview is on, look at the Technology Preview tab in the Camera Raw Preferences dialog. Please try turning it off, turning GPU back on and next, and this is important with this tech preview, quit and relaunch Photoshop and Bridge; the tech preview does not turn on/off w/o a relaunch of the host app. With GPU on and the HDRO tech preview off on Windows, I don't think you will see the oversaturation. This will be fixed in a future release of the HDRO tech preview. I think turning off the tech preview is a better workaround than going back to 14.5 or turning off GPU. 

Thanks,

David

[D Fosse]

Indeed. I see the same oversaturation here when enabling HDR and relaunching PS/Br. Uncheck/relaunch, and it's back to normal.

That's very useful to know, thanks David!

[TomBPhoto]

Great spot @David Franzen at Work I didn't know the preview was enabled and turning it off completely seems to have fixed the colour shift! I'm back to the latest version of ACR and have the GPU enabled without any problems now. 

Thanks for the insight! 

[touchoffaith89]

David,

Having the same problem here. I can't seem to find the setting you reference in this post. The "Technology Preview" tab is not in my preferences for Camera Raw. Any direction would be greatly appreciated. I am at a standstill on my photo editing until I can get this solved. Thank you!