Preview Button!!!!

[stlouiscrash09]

Hello, I am incredibly upset about the removal of the preview button in Camera Raw. It has completely interrupted my workflow. I don't mind the ADDITION of new features for those who make take advantage of them, but the REMOVAL of perfectly good features that many of us are used to using is asinine and if you can't tell I am rather upset about it. Please for the sake of god bring it back.

[pcmanpcman]

I aggree.

the new "swap before after" feature is totaly confusing

do some changes to an image

press p

if you accidently press ctrl + z and press p

you'll don't know what you're viewing.

and the YY (cycles between) makes acr workflow VERY VERY SLOW

so if you want to make ACR to look like lightroom, put an ON/OFF switch to each tab or just bring the preview button back

the snanpshots is not a solution

instead of one click to the old preview now you make 4 clicks

1 snapshots -> 2 new snapshot -> 3 name the snaphot -> ok.

nahhh

[Hudechrome]

Thanks for posting.

Notice there is no "Staff" flag accompanying Mr. Schewe's name. He is not an employee but has the temerity to come here and act as if he does. We have tangled in the past over this issue and still he persists in playing "Bad Cop" or similar. It doesn't work for me.

I do appreciate his books and writings and have learned from them especially at the onset of ACR. That does not excuse his boorishness and his preempting the Staff person's reply to whom I addressed my concerns.

As you can see, Mr Schewe, our findings are quite similar. We have a point and contrary to your assertion that there is nothing we can do, there is. One is rollback. If rollback cannot be accomplished for CC, then the alternate is to move back to CS6,and ignore ACR updates. Also, making use of LR (which is on this computer) and again, not updating.

Imagine, one day you come home to find that the electrician has been there, and now where you had one switch to turn the lights on and off, there are three, and no instructions. One says before after, nothing happens, but by messing combinations of the three, you finally succeed in making something happen. But in the middle of all this you no longer can even turn the lights off nor is there any backtracking. Your only recourse is to find the breaker panel, switch it off and on and the system resets. But you still cannot simply turn your lights on and off from the new great system!

That in a nutshell is what we have here.

Software needs to be transparent. I also believe it should be invisible, that is it does not assert itself in the process unless you are doing something which can compromise operations (like deleting a .dll unknowingly). It will probably be a cold day in hades before we see that, but I can dream! But transparency is doable.

Finally, respect for the people who come here to address their concerns and share their experiences and help cannot be an option. That seems to be not even an option.

Mr. Schewe is welcome and encouraged to offer his  considerable expertise which I understand and is also true of all of us, is done with no compensation other than satisfaction in helping. Let's play nice!

Thank you

Lawrence

Message was edited by: Hudechrome

[Jeff Schewe]

Hudechrome wrote:

Mr. Schewe is welcome and encouraged to offer his  considerable expertise which I understand and is also true of all of us, is done with no compensation other than satisfaction in helping. Let's play nice!

Hum...first you sling some mud around and then you say play nice? That's delicious irony...

No, I'm not an employee of Adobe, but I do actually work with the ACR & LR engineers developing and testing the products. So, when I say the Preview Button is gone, it's because I've had an email exchange with the ACR engineers that's what they told me.

So, whether you like it or not, you may as well take the time to learn how to use Before/After or not. No skin off my nose because personally, I never used it. I use snapshots. Which if you use the keyboard short cut (Command/Shift S) allows for the creation of a new snapshot from any panel. All you have to do is type in the name & hit return.

The advanteges of snapshots over the Preview button is you get to name the snapshot and the snapshot is stored in the xmp metadata so you can close out the image and recall it at any future time.

Snapshots and Before/After are vastly more powerful than the old (and now gone) Preview button...

[Hudechrome]

I give as I receive Jeff. Starting off with a note of respect instead of "the ship has sailed" or such would not have incurred my response.

I have learned it and written my findings. It is an extended first look of course, but as you can see from even Max Wendt, we are not on the same page as to the best solution to the dilemma.

I pay $600/yr/seat  for the right to use the software and obtain the updates/upgrades. I run LR, PS and Audition. My preference still lies with PS, mostly because it is what I have been using since before the turn of the millenia. As such I am on an equal footing with anyone here as to the degree of consideration for my POV and criticism.

As to snapshots, you have recommended them in the past to a query I had and it did work, although slowing down more than I wished to do for general use. Now it's general use. Rather, if the Preview is actually gone then a history pallet would be a better choice, at least for me.

Finally, it doesn't have to be gone. Just roll back to the earlier version. CS6 covers the D7100, and would be a last resort option. Of course, I'll continue to evaluate the new triple button version and will report back any findings and hopefully, some easing of the increased workload presented by the process.

It has merit. As with Snapshots, I prefer that it be a choice.

[lempinet]

I too miss the preview button dearly but I am trying to get used to the new before/after and Alt-P - by the way, Alt-P is not a great shortcut on german keyboards since there is only the left Alt key, I actually mapped AltGr to function as Alt).

The other thing I noticed is that pressing P with a gradient crashes Bridge every time - anyone else noticed this? (ACR 8.4, Bridge CC, Windows 8.1 64bit)

[Hudechrome]

I don't understand what you are doing with Gradient. I don't see it in ACR or Bridge, only PS, and would not expect to in Bridge.

What are your steps?

[lempinet]

I mean the Graduated Filter - if it is active and I press P - Bridge including ACR crashes...

[max.wendt]

There's no need to make a named snapshot for this - just save your Before state at any point that you want to compare.

[Hudechrome]

Max, please see my post #28. It becomes confusing as the process continues.

[Lidenbrook]

Sorry, I can not agree at all with the solutions proposed to replace the box on / off display of each panel ....

What you said is true for most cameras , but is not valid for cameras with sensors without low-pass filter (Nikon D800E and 7100 , Pentax K5 and K3 IIs , etc ...) , since in this case the right approach depends entirely it is possible to disable the display panel detail . No good with making a before / after for that setting , as setting before being transferred does not include the deactivation of the box and therefore contains settings - default - involving incorrect display .

I mean, in this type of sensors, if I expand the image at 100 % or more - as it should be to check focus and noise reduction correctly - and disable the box preview , see the image with a certain degree of sharpness. If activated with default values ​​, we find that significantly blurs the image . To get the original degree of focus of the image , the one with the box unchecked - equivalent to that we did not give any approach - you have to put a value on "Quantity" value of around 100 - depends on camera , in this case typical value found for the Pentax K5 IIs - with a "Radio" between 1.1 and 1.3 - while the default value is 1.0 - and a " detail " from 25 ( default) . The value of the mask and noise reduction depend on the iso employee ...

Well, with these values ​​- 100 , 1.2 and 25 - if we alternate between activation and deactivation of the box , check that the image is the same in both cases. This has nothing to do with what happens if we put the values ​​of the Detail panel for the approach to 0 and activate and deactivate the display .... In this second case , we will check as activated image display and the values ​​to 0 is much more blurred the image box display off (very noticeable in this case). Even with the default settings , with the display off the image is much sharper .... Therefore, the only way to know how much we are giving focus is to deactivate and activate the display , not copy settings before as a benchmark , since that would visuaización which corresponds to the default values ​​- or those of 0 if we put a 0 as a reference - and as just discussed , not really correspond to the image as it is in reality (no display panel). 

So, effectively , is an incorrect modification for certain cameras which is a serious drawback when adjusting to acutance image ..... Although Mr Shiui disagree ..... Sure, in Lr there is not such problem ...... like who does not have it working with this type of sensors .... 

Lords of Adobe , please add the ability to disable the display of the panel - in other panels is much less important because the copy function values ​​after a Before serve perfectly - for those who work with sensors unfiltered AA they can do things properly and easily ( I used to give us a valid solution as simple as activating and deactivating the preview box .....) . Otherwise, with the current system, and complicated work, we are wasting our image quality RAWs . 

I beg your pardon me for my bad English , I hope you will understand what that comment ....

Regards

PS: By the way....(I´m a rude, i beg uour pardon....), updating and new ACR functions, including functions Before/After, etc., seems to me a breakthrough, no doub....., but where this does not entail the disappearance of the box to enable/disable the display panel Detail....

[Jeff Schewe]

Lidenbrook wrote:

So, effectively , is an incorrect modification for certain cameras which is a serious drawback when adjusting to acutance image ..... Although Mr Shiui disagree ..... Sure, in Lr there is not such problem ...... like who does not have it working with this type of sensors .... 

Are you referring to me? My name ain't Shiui, it's Schewe...if you weren't referring to me, never mind :~)

You can easily turn off all sharpening in ACR by adjusting the amount to 0. With zero sharpening, none of the other settings have any impact. So, if you want a binary on/off, adjust the settings that you want and set that to the After setting and then turn the amount to 0 for the before.

Even simplier, make your adjustments and at the last step set amount to 0 and then simply undo. That way you have and easy method of seeing sharpening on and off.

In any event, the Preview button per panel is gone. Sorry, you'll need to modify the way you work.

[Hudechrome]

"Even simpler, make your adjustments and at the last step set amount to 0 and then simply undo. That way you have and easy method of seeing sharpening on and off."

My fallback as well.

Nothing is written in stone so for the moment, the switch is missing but "The squeaky wheel gets the grease" and we definitely have a squeaky wheel here.

The entire neighborhood hears it!

The other recourse is to do sharpening with a professional sharpening tool that have the algorithms for lens and sensors preloaded. No guessing and if one likes it "sharper" that can also be arranged with available tools.

Message was edited by: Hudechrome

[Jeff Schewe]

Hudechrome wrote:

Nothing is written in stone so for the moment, the switch is missing but "The squeaky wheel gets the grease" and we definitely have a squeaky wheel here.

Well...if I were at liberty to show you an email exchange I had with certain ACR engineers, you might realize that the stone has indeed been written.

So far, the relative lack of understanding of how to use Before/After and Snapshots hasn't reached the level of traction needed to rewrite the stone. Yes, I pointed out LR's ability to turn on/off a panel's preview. Yes, I pointed out that some users were dependent upon the old way of using the per panel Preview. Sorry to say, those discussion got nowhere..

Look, I'm not unsympathetic to those users who grew to rely upon the old behavior...but what I'm trying to get across is that there is some pretty strong resistance to undoing the effort that was required to do Before/After and reintroduce the old per panel preview behavior.

So, do you really want to swim upstream against impossible odds? Go right ahead…just know that the odds of getting anywhere are somewhere between zero and no way…

Kinda like when I said that ship has sailed…I wasn't trying to be an a'hole, I was trying to get the point across that after due consideration, the old preview button behavior is dead...

[Hudechrome]

Well, if this was a court of law and not opinion, what your testimony would amount to is hearsay, especially when the staff person did not back it up.

I fail to understand (other than ego) why "No" should be cast in stone.

Ego plays a big role in photography, but in software?

At any rate, I'll search for my best solution. Yours are workable but only as workarounds other than using 8.4.1.200 to it's particular advantage. Which is considerable on it's own merits.

I said it before: In using before and after in sharpening amounts to a test procedure and any valid test procedure involves holding all parameters constant except for the one you are testing. I've done this for well over 50 years (approaching 57, to be exact) from my beginnings (and the most rigorous, at Argonne National Labs) to the present. It has never failed me whereas relaxing that standard has failed me, at times seriously. My only two paths at the moment is to rely on basic filtering at DxO and/or minimizing the impact of all the other changes that can couple into Before/Afters in the current ACR.

Or, abandon Bridge/ACR and go completely to Lightroom.

[Jeff Schewe]

Hudechrome wrote:

Well, if this was a court of law and not opinion, what your testimony would amount to is hearsay, especially when the staff person did not back it up.

So, consider it hearsay that Thomas said no...

Hudechrome wrote:

Ego plays a big role in photography, but in software?

Well, when the "ego" in question created this whole digital imaging thingie, it's hard to argue against it...

Look, Thoams said no...and there are techical reasons that doing what people are asking for–meaning the "Preview button" isn't easy and why what LR does is, well problimatic.

Thomas has chosen not to respond, so my take is, Thomas doesn't care...Max tried to offer a work around...then quit posting. So, you are down to talking to me. Sorry...that's the way it is.

[Hudechrome]

"Thomas doesn't care"...

Ok, now we are getting somewhere.

But then, saying "I don't care" can also mean "Do what you want". That's always my take on it. I hear that and I take control.

I care. I care about my work. I employ the best tools and procedures and I apply them according to the best standards and practices available to the best of my ability. My loyalty is to these principles.

Tell Thomas that.

[Jeff Schewe]

Hudechrome wrote:

I care. I care about my work. I employ the best tools and procedures and I apply them according to the best standards and practices available to the best of my ability. My loyalty is to these principles.

Tell Thomas that.

And don't presume for a moment that Thomas doesn't care...if he didn't, he wouldn't have written Camera Raw in the first place.

Also don't presume I don't care...I do care about image quality...

I do, perhaps more than most people. However, I tend to get far less locked into "how" to do something than arriving at an optimal result (which I do care about–as does Thomas). I really don't care how I arrive at an image's optimal settings...

Do you honestly think that you can no no longer arrive at the optimal image adjustment settings because of these changes? Or, are you just disturbed that how you do it has been changed?

I'm pretty good at adjusting raw image settings...the new changes to the Before/After seem to be an advancement rather than a step back, So, considering I kinda know a thing or two, what do I know that you don't know?

I'm happy to advance how people use ACR & LR...I've tried to do so in this thread. But if you are complaining simply because of change, well, I'm less sensitive to that than making a case that you can't use the new functionality to accomplish what you need to accomplish. So far, that case hasn't been made...

[Hudechrome]

"so my take is, Thomas doesn't care."

Those were your words, not mine. I was rather nonplussed at first, so I re-read it. Then responded.

To reduce my responses to simply complaining is beyond the pale. I have made my case using classic testing procedures, developed before you and I were even born.

To strengthen it, I go to Occam's Razor.

"It states that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Other, more complicated solutions may ultimately prove correct, but—in the absence of certainty—the fewer assumptions that are made, the better."

No assumptions need making with simple on/off. DxO understands that perfectly. Each and every panel has an on/off switch.

Do you honestly think that you can no no longer arrive at the optimal image adjustment settings because of these changes? Or, are you just disturbed that how you do it has been changed?

I cannot be sure that I have arrived there if I am denied simple access to an on-off for a specific panel, especially one that is the most technically sophisticated as sharpness/resolution/noise. There is no certainty. If I see the digital equivalent of Mackie Lines at transitions which change as a function of some control other than sharpness (which happens), what am I to do? Muck around?

Since I started using digital processing, this became front and center. Yes, I can go through some gyrations to come back to a point which appears I am back at the simple on-off, but if there is any lingering doubt about what I am seeing and what to do about it I am rather loathe to sign the result.

Look at DxO. There is a separate switch for sharpness, and noise. In ACR, noise and sharpness is coupled together. We already had a form of coupling two parameters together. I was completely relieved that DxO provides me with a correction for both that is separate and based on algorithms, not eyeballs, with on/off. Yep, I can and have used the eyeball method, not only for the subject under consideration but screen calibration as well. Remember that? Calibration by extinguishment. We left that ASAP. It wasn't a simple solution. There was no certainty.

Ultimately, it's an art, and as such, we move beyond objectivity. I know that and use it in ways you do not know I do. Maybe you do also. I don't know.

Message was edited by: Hudechrome

[Jeff Schewe]

Hudechrome wrote:

"so my take is, Thomas doesn't care."

Those were your words, not mine. I was rather nonplussed at first, so I re-read it. Then responded.

What I said was, I don't think Thomas cares what YOU think...sorry to be blunt, but in the grand scheme of things, I suspect that the engineers don't listen too much to individual complaints when trying to do the right thing, overall.

I still think your use case is weak...there are indeed ways or accomplishing what you say you want to do without the Preview button. And, those new functions are vastly more powerful and capable compared to what you claim to have lost.

Sorry doode...but what you seem to be doing is crying over spilt milk...can you do what you need to do with ACR 8.3 that you can't do with ACR 8.4?

I would argue that you can...and yes, it may be a bit more inconvenient but that's not really a major concern to me...ACR 8.4 is an advance over 8.3. If you don't agree, then you can keep twisting in the wind, or you can learn how to do what you need and move on. Or not.  You are perfectly welcome to use DxO rather than ACR...your choice. No skin off my nose...

[Hudechrome]

Please go back and look at what you said. It does not read " What I said was, I don't think Thomas cares what YOU think."

I would like him to show up and say it, not send his mouthpiece.

As for the rest of your last post, first, I am not making the case to you. You are the conduit, not the destination. If this were private communication, it would have ended long ago. Your type appeared in "Alice in Wonderland", known as the Red Queen. Now she was nastier for sure, and for both of you, it didn't matter what anyone else said. It never does. That's why I would have ended it earlier.

I am making a case from strong engineering principles. I've been doing it for years, and many times, like here, it is an uphill battle. I don't care if you think it's weak or strong. I don't have to make a case for you nor is this for you. I noted a staff person entered the conversation, indicating they are reading this. It's for staff, and if strong engineering principles don't matter, well that's that.

I'll leave it at this. Good enough doesn't cut it. Especially when good enough replaces excellent, as it does here. And by the way, where did I say replace the new with the old? To the engineers I say keep the new. It does certain jobs better, I know that. Keep it and give us the original option as well.

Ok, I'm done.

[max.wendt]

I haven't left you guys... I just had a bit of a busy weekend. I'm still here.

Hudechrome, you wrote:

"In ACR, noise and sharpness is coupled together. We already had a form of coupling two parameters together."

The ability to decouple these is precisely one of the strengths of the new Preview system. YOU get to decide exactly what you're previewing against. The principle of looking at just one set of changes against a checkpoint is something I value very much, too.

So aside from the half second it takes to click an onscreen button (or use a keyboard shortcut) to explicitly set the state you want to compare your adjustments against, I'm not seeing what functionality has been lost. In the case you mention, you've actually gained functionality: you can now preview noise and sharpness changes independently.

I totally understand your desire to do very targeted comparisons; that's how I work. I would never intentionally destroy that workflow (and don't think I have).

What I'm not understanding is what you're missing. Yes, you do have to take a moment to set your before state, but that seems like a small price to pay for much more power and flexibility. Once you're accustomed to it, it becomes second nature.

Is there something more that I'm not seeing?

Thanks!

[Hudechrome]

Thanks Max. I hadn't considering decoupling noise and sharpening, but it makes sense. Perhaps I am complicating the process.

This is what I see I have to do to see these separately.

1) Set Before

2) Make, say, the sharpening change

3) Do before After.

Ok I want to now do just noise. As I see it, I would then have to go to:

4) Basic>RAW Defaults

5) Set Before

6) Make the noise Change

7) Do before and after.

Now, suppose I want to collect both together as a final setting I will incorporate as I move through other corrections. Here's where it gets less transparent. What happens with each new decision to set a Before state to these settings within the edit process? It is far from clear as to what I can expect and much experimenting will be required, imo anyway. It feels like there is a "Gotcha" lingering here.

(Maybe I'm just dense!)

Belaboring the difference between DxO and ACR, here's the same process there. (I'll bypass the Auto feature which runs the camera/lens profile)

1) Go to Noise Panel. Move the noise slider. The Toggle button lights "on" and the software runs your selection.

2) Go to Sharpening Panel. Move the slider and the Toggle button lights "on" and the software runs your selection.

3) Click either button to go back to default.

Leave them in either state, run each of the other panels and combine at your heart's desire.

The answer for ACR seems to be practice, practice, practice. Which I would only have to do if I need the power. I'm not adverse to that, I'm adverse to having to do that just to get back to where I was before in past versions. I suppose I could go back one version and stay there.

What would be most helpful is a tutorial running a set of adjustments in combination taking full advantage of the new while highlighting seeing certain operations in isolation.

At least, that's where I am at the moment.

Thanks for your help, Max.

[max.wendt]

Hudechrome wrote:

This is what I see I have to do to see these separately.

1) Set Before

2) Make, say, the sharpening change

3) Do before After.

Ok I want to now do just noise. As I see it, I would then have to go to:

4) Basic>RAW Defaults

5) Set Before

6) Make the noise Change

7) Do before and after.

I didn't mean that you'd decouple them in the sense that you'd go back to the defaults in between making your edits, just that you're now able to preview just the effects of one or the other. Before, you could only see them as a set. Now you can:

• set Before
• do your sharpening
• A/B the results of just sharpening

Once you're happy with your sharpening work, you can move on to noise:

• set Before
• do your noise reduction
• A/B the results of just noise reduction

Here's where the advantage comes in: as you're comparing the effects of your noise work, you don't have your sharpening work going away on you. When you swap, you're seeing only the noise reduction changes.

Hudechrome wrote:

Now, suppose I want to collect both together as a final setting I will incorporate as I move through other corrections. Here's where it gets less transparent. What happens with each new decision to set a Before state to these settings within the edit process?

Think of the Before state as kind of an internal Snapshot. It's not actually, but that may be the easiest way to conceptualize this. When you save your Before state, your current settings are copied into it. So your current sharpening and noise values are stored into the Before state just as they are.

I tend to think of saving Before states as "checkpoints" - when I'm happy with what I've got so far, I hit the keyboard shortcut to save my Before state. Now I can move on to the next thing, and A/B it against what I've done to that point.

Often, in the course of editing, I want to go back and revisit some of my earlier decisions; for example, let's say a local white balance adjustment is making me rethink my global white balance. I've got a checkpoint that includes everything I've done up to that point, including some global exposure changes. With the new Preview feature, I can A/B that against my new tweaks to the global white balance, without losing the preview of all the other work I've done in the Basic panel.

If you were working with this scenario using the old Preview checkbox, trying to preview the changes to the global white balance would also force you to try to see through all the other adjustments you'd made since you started working on the image. Depending on the image and/or the editing, that could have been substantial. Now, you can do that very targeted global white balance comparison while keeping all the other adjustments as they currently are.

IMO, that's a huge improvement over the old system.

And, of course, if you do want to A/B against how the image looked when you opened it (which I do also find useful), you can do that, too... see my earlier reply.

[Carlos_Oliveras]

I would like to know if Lidenbrook's findings are correct - I think he is saying that on Pentax cameras without an optical low pass filter, the image appears more blurry with the preview for the detail panel checked that unchecked, even if the sharpening amount is set to zero - in other words, it would mean that in these cases, the mere fact of previewing sharpening, even if none is being really applied, causes some blurriness in the image (unless the difference is being caused by the default color noise reduction of 25... although I don't think that's enough to blur an image).

Please note that I don't own a Pentax, I'm a Canon shooter but I teach Photoshop and Lightroom (and I run a PS/LR blog) and I have to deal with people that own any possible camera brand, so I'd like to be prepared in advance should weird things like this really happen. I've downloaded a sample Pentax K5 IIs raw file from this page and truth is I couldn't replicate Lidenbrook's results, but he seems to be knoledgeable about Pentax sensors, and I know sensors like the Fuji X-Trans (without AA filter) had some issues with ACR's demosaicing in the past - well, I believe it was not really due to the lack of an AA filter but caused by their peculiar "not Bayer" color filter array. But, like I was saying, now I'm wondering if ACR sharpening algorithms could really worsen images from certain sensors even when amount=0.

---

Back on topic, as I already said, I'm not really too worried about the removal of the preview checkbox since I use LR way more than ACR. In fact, most of the time I could be described as a (proud) Adobe fan boy. That being said and for the sake of honesty, I do think that, while the new system is indeed more powerful (Max is right, I always hated having to see sharpening and noise reduction coupled), maybe the extra power doesn't compensate for the extra waste of time and confusion that it introduces when being used for very simple tasks - in those cases, the preview box, instead, was quicker and unequivocal. I mean, a Swiss knife beats an ordinary knife hands down - it's much more functional! But if I go to a restaurant and they've replaced knife, fork and spoon for swiss knives... well, you get the idea. Of course the new feature is not as cumbersome as a mega-Swiss knife. It's just a graphic example. But let's not forget that we're not comparing a 5 clicks solution versus a 6 clicks solution: we're comparing a 1 click solution versus a more-than-one-click solution, and in the context of such a simple task, the marginal cost of every extra click is very high. Or at least, user perception of required effort tends to be more than proportional to the "nominal" increase.

Anyway, I think that the real root of the conflict here is not really the new feature, but the fact that maybe introducing the new before/after feature could have been done without removing the preview checkbox. Yes, the old preview checkbox can be simulated via the new "before/after", same as a Swiss knife can "simulate" a knife. But I think each of them meets different needs - LR has both of them (Before/After + on/off switches), so it might not be a totally crazy idea. Yes, yes, LR is not ACR, we already discussed that and I 100% agree, but then, why introduce something that looks like a striped-down LR feature (before/after without history) and remove something that was genuinely ACR-ish?

Please let me state again that this is just my opinion, my thoughts, my humble insight. And while I personally know some people that are deeply upset with the new system, it's also true that most of the photographers I've met lately seem to ignore this change, at least so far (this change is not present in ACR 8.4 for CS6, and I guess that's one of the reasons, since many people is sticking to CS6).

Anyway, enough time will have been wasted if Jeff or anyone at Adobe reads it, so no reply is needed - but still, I'd like to know if somebody could confirm or deny the sharpening issue with the Pentax raws and the old preview box. Thanks.

[Hudechrome]

I have a D7100 so I ran a check. Now I don't have a lens which can be classed as the sharpest available especially for this test. With that caveat, I ran the test you ran on several images and found no change whatsoever moving from Basic to Detail, back and forth. Further, adding noise suppression value of 25 to the test revealed barely a ghost of a change, all at 200%. Moving the Sharpening Amount to 25, Radius 1.0, detail to 25  showed  maybe a cancellation of the noise shift, if that.

Perhaps it is a Pentax problem, but it isn't a D7100 problem with current optic.