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Andrej Michelcich
Known Participant
June 14, 2023
Question

P: Colored "pixel" artifacts/subdued blacks in shadow areas (older Macs) (also visible on CR)

  • June 14, 2023
  • 173 replies
  • 111536 views

I updated LrC to 12.4 yesyerday. Since then a number of pixels in multiple colors appear appear quite often on the image, mostly in the areas of blacks/darks and when using Tone Curve commands. It's similar to the red/blue pixels which denoted clipping in the areas of blacks/whites, but they appear in very many different other colors. Sometimes they disappear, or decrease, after actioning the commands again, sometimes they do not. Is anybody else facing the same problem which I encounter now for the vey first time after many years of use of LrC? Thank you in advance for your advise.

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173 replies

Participant
October 7, 2023

Hi, I am using the latest version of lightroom, but I see something I've never saw before while editing.. somehow dark/contrast colours in my photo's automatically turn blue/purple/red/yellow. 

I'ts very hard to edit my photo's right now and I've tried everything to remove this but nothing helps. Does anoyone know what this is??? Please help!

 

johnrellis
Legend
October 7, 2023

See the pinned reply at the top of the thread into which your post was merged

johnrellis
Legend
October 7, 2023

The pinned post is a bit ridiculous trying to blame old drivers.  These are Macs, we don't worry about drivers.  Furthermore, these are on devices still supported by Apple, running recent versions of macOS such as Big Sur or Ventura.  The breakage happened between versions of Lightroom (12.3 -> 12.4), which points to a bug and missed QA by Adobe.

The workarounds are either: rollback to Lr Classic 12.3 or disable GPU acceleration (but then Lr might nag you to re-enable it)


"Furthermore, these are on devices still supported by Apple, running recent versions of macOS such as Big Sur or Ventura."

 

Even if a Mac is still "supported" by Apple, its graphic driver can and often does have bugs.

 

In the last couple of years, as Adobe has aggressively enhanced LR to use graphics processors (GPUs), by far the most common cause of reported display and AI masking glitches is buggy drivers, and usually updating the driver fixes the issue. There are hundreds of posts about this in this forum.  LR uses the graphics processor much differently than other categories of apps (e.g. games and video editing) and is constantly tripping over driver bugs.

 

On Windows, of course, that means getting the latest driver from the manufacturer's web site, but on Mac, you have to wait for the manufacturer to provide an updated driver to Apple and then for Apple to include it in the next release of Mac OS.

 

Unfortunately, the dozens of prior posts in this thread were lost due to a forum glitch, but Rikk Flohr accurately summarized the issue: most of the posts reported older Macs.  


Older Macs with Intel graphics chipsets no longer get updated drivers from Intel, since Intel has explicitly moved those chipsets to its "legacy support" model (i.e. no bug fixes).

 

Older Macs with the AMD Radeon R6 M390 are in a similar boat -- that graphics processor is eight years old and AMD announced it has stopped providing bug fixes.  A couple of the lost posts in this thread were from users with that GPU.

 

Mac users with an AMD Radeon Pro 5700 or RX 6600 reported bugs with AI People masking in the last five months. Some initial reports indicate that Mac OS 14 fixes the issue, strongly suggesting that Mac OS 14 includes updated drivers.  A Windows user with an RX 6600 reported very similar symptoms, and after updating his driver last month, the problem went away, again indicating the problem is likely with the Mac driver.

 

"The breakage happened between versions of Lightroom (12.3 -> 12.4), which points to a bug and missed QA by Adobe."

 

Adobe is constantly enhancing Camera Raw's and LR's use of the graphics processor. There are many reports here of a display or AI masking bug appearing as the result of a recent LR update.  While that could be cuased by a recently introduced LR bug, more likely it is the changed code in CR/LR tripping over a driver bug in a way that the old LR code didn't.

 

In general, CR and LR don't code to a particular graphics processor. They use the operating system's API for display operations and executing AI models, and the operating system relies on the manufacturers' drivers to translate those API calls into hardware-specific commands.  So if there's a glitch that only occurs with particular graphics processors, Occam's razor indicates that's probably a driver problem, not a LR bug. And the experience here that updating to the latest drivers usually fixes the problem supports that conclusion.

Participant
October 3, 2023

 

Has anyone had a similar problem in LR Classic?

 

As you can see from the above, there seems to be a weird bug/glitch while editing. This is an unedited image (note I have black out the peoples faces for privacy) but apart from this, I have not made any images to the image. The original/raw doesn't look like this and even if I save the image, it doesn't save like this. So I think the issue is with the viewing window in LR. The only way I can get rid of it is if I close LR and re open. But it will come back again after a editing for a while. 

It doesn't necessarily come back on the same image.

 

Can someone help? Or can Adobe fix? Unsure how to report the issue directly with them.

 

Thanks in advance. 

Participating Frequently
October 3, 2023

Disable GPU support or rollback to Lightroom Classic 12.3. For me, disabling the GPU gave me a pop-up message on next app launch nagging me to re-enable GPU, so I rolled back to the older Lr.

 

I just found some notifications in my spam folder, but the messages are missing here.  If somebody from Adobe needs a sample, please contact me directly.

Rikk Flohr_Photography
Community Manager
Community Manager
October 2, 2023

Summary:

We can still not replicate this failure on test or production machines at Adobe. This appears to occur on Lightroom 12.4/Camera Raw 15.4 and later on very old Macs (8 Years and older) and is likely due to out-of-date video drivers on no longer-supported or updated GPUs.

The issue manifests as visual color artifacts in the Develop view only but doesn't always appear on exported images. It can also manifest as less-than-black deep shadow areas.

  • Some customers report that disabling GPU restores functionality to normal. 
  • Others have reported that updating to Sonoma has provided relief.
  • Reverting an image to PV4 eliminates the artifacts for some others. 
  • Reverting to LrC 12.3 or CR 15.3 has provided relief for some.


11/30/2023 

  • It has been discovered by some customers that this affects Camera Raw rendering as well.  The summary text has been updated to reflect this. The two separate Pinned Posts on this thread have been consolidated.

 

11/22/2023:
An Update and an Inquiry to afflicted customers:

  • First, the missing content that was mysteriously moved to a 2009 Cold Fusion thread should be restored. We apologize for any confusion that was caused. 
  • Second - and perhaps more importantly, we need to ask a question of those who are afflicted with the unusual colored pixels. 


10/27/2023: Update - we've received responses from three persons volunteering to screen share with the Classic team.  At this time, we do not need any additional volunteers. This thread will be updated once the investigation is complete. 

10/17/2023: Update and a request for persons to demonstrate the issue

As we cannot replicate this failure on test or production machines at Adobe, we are looking for a few people to demo the issue for us. 

Requirements: 
The Classic team is requesting the aid of a few persons who can demonstrate this issue in a live screen share. In order to be considered, you need to be able to: 

  1.  Recreate the issue at will with GPU in the ON setting
  2.  Connect with the Classic team via a screen share  (MS Teams or similar). Note: the team is IST, and the hours may be odd, depending upon your location.
  3.  Review MacOS System settings live with the team
  4.  Demonstrate the odd pixels in Lightroom Classic 13.0.1.

 

If you are able to meet these requirements, direct message me with your full name and the email where you can be contacted.  We should only need a few people to reply to confirm the information the team is requesting. 

 

Thank you for your patience. 

10/2/23 Update:
Additional posts formerly in this thread are currently MIA. The community forum team is investigating. We do not know if we will be able to restore the missing content.  As of 11/22.2023: The content has been restored.

 

Rikk Flohr: Adobe Photography Org
Participating Frequently
August 28, 2023

Hola, 

Al utilizar en la pantalla de calibración la versión 6 (actual) y la 5, lightroom me lava los negros empastados de la foto, en cambio en la versión 4 no. El problema también es que cambio a la versión 4 para no tener este problema y continuamente me cambia a la 6 automáticamente, por lo que tengo que estar todo el tiempo cambiando de versión.

Tengo el lightroom actualizado en la última versión v12.5

Espero que sea posible solucionarlo, a ver si alguien sabe como arreglar esto.

 

Sean McCormack
Community Expert
Community Expert
August 28, 2023

I think you mean Process Version. I see no difference between 4, 5 and 6 on an unedited photo. When I increase to +60 Blacks, I'm not seeing a difference there either.

Sean McCormack. Author of 'Essential Development 3'. Magazine Writer. Former Official Fuji X-Photographer.