P: Color profile missing after merging Apple ProRaw images into a panorama

[wallacewhite]

Apple ProRaw images taken in Apple's camera app on my iPhone 14 Pro generally work well in LrC these days, which is great. In LrC I often use the "Apple ProRaw" profile.

When I perform a panorama merge of these images, however, LrC reports that the resulting .dng file is using the profile "Apple Embedded Color Profile" but shows an exclamation mark: "Profile missing." See attached screenshots.

I wonder if this is an inadvertent result of LrC's rule that only Apple ProRaw files have the option of the LrC ProRaw profile, and that the merged file is not recognized by LrC as a ProRaw file. Can this please be improved, or is there a workaround?

Thanks,

Wallace

[wallacewhite]

• Lightroom Classic Version Number: 12.4 Release, Camera Raw 15.4 (current; the bug was also present in the earlier release I was using)
• OS Version Number: macOS Ventura 13.4.1 (current)

[johnrellis]

Select two sample Proraws that cause this problem when merging. Upload them to Dropbox, Google Drive, or similar, and post the sharing link here. That will allow Adobe to reproduce the problem and get this filed as a formal bug report.

[wallacewhite]

Sure, here's a set of three ProRaw files and the resultant panorama merge exhibiting this problem:

OneDrive: Apple ProRaw merge color profile 

[johnrellis]

I see the same problem with those samples. Photo Merge is forgetting to copy the metadata field EXIF:ProfileName from the source .dngs to the merged .dng.

You can work around the bug by using the free Exiftool utility:

1. In LR, select the merged .dng and do Metadata > Save Metadata To File.

2. In Terminal, execute this command line:

exiftool -profilename="Apple Embedded Color Profile" <path of merged dng>

3. In LR, do Metadata > Read Metadata From File.

[johnrellis]

@Rikk Flohr: Photography, please consider moving to Bugs.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Moved to bugs

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Has anyone on the thread confirmed that Camera Raw fails similarly?

[johnrellis]

[This post contains formatting and embedded images that don't appear in email. View the post in your Web browser.]

The problem occurs in my CR 15.4:

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Thanks @johnrellis  I will route this appropriately.

[wallacewhite]

Thanks, @johnrellis, but doing so had no effect:

• For the merged .dng that I posted on OneDrive and whose profile I had already changed in LrC to "Adobe Standard," after exiftool the profile in LrC remained "Adobe Standard" and no new profile options were available.
• When I performed the panorama merge again and left the new .dng's profile in LrC showing that "Apple Embedded Color Profile" was missing, after exiftool the profile in LrC was unchanged and "Profile missing" was still displayed.

FWIW, when I used exiftool to read that merged .dng after I exported the metadata in LrC, "ProRaw" did appear in the tag "Look Name". Here were the nearby tags:

Look Name : Apple ProRaw
Look Amount : 1
Look UUID : D866CAE82BD24C3F896B6762BDDA6C50
Look Supports Monochrome : false
Look Supports Output Referred : false
Look Group : Profiles
Look Parameters Version : 15.4
Look Parameters Process Version : 15.4
Look Parameters Profile Gain Table Map: 100
Look Parameters Convert To Grayscale: False
Look Parameters Camera Profile : Apple Embedded Color Profile

I found the same tags and values in the source ProRaw image that I had fed into the panorama merge, so it looks like LrC is handling the source image and the merged result the same in this regard.

[johnrellis]

Hmm, after running Exiftool, did you do step 3, selecting the merged .dng and doing Metadata > Read Metadata From File?  I re-tested my recipe, with both the merged .dng you included in your .zip and with a new one made in my LR, and it worked correctly.   See the screen recording:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/d6x7hwot99n9d1t/fixing-apple-proraw-panoramas.2023.07.10.mp4?dl=0

It's the field EXIF:ProfileName that LR is failing to copy into the merged .dng -- the other XMP fields are getting set correctly.

[wallacewhite]

Hi @johnrellis. Yes, I'm pretty good at following clear instructions of three steps. I might be able to do four or five. 🙂  

Thanks for making a screen recording of it working on your computer. Here's a similar recording of it not working on mine: Wallace exiftool ProRaw. 

When I first tried your workaround, I used whatever exiftool version I installed a few years ago. I then updated to the current version (12.64) just to be safe, but it made no difference.

[johnrellis]

Perhaps you could upload the folder of those test files along with the merged dng that you modified unsuccessfully with Exiftool?  I'd like to get to the bottom of this -- thanks.

[wallacewhite]

Thanks for your continued interest, @johnrellis. Yes, in that OneDrive folder, I've added the file "2023-07-04 Hike Granite Mtn 3619-Pano after exiftool.dng".

While recreating it, I noticed something else. I tried adding a fourth step (!) to the recipe: remove the merge from LrC and import it, in case that affects how LrC interprets it. It did, in an odd way. LrC showed its profile as Apple ProRaw, yet the image doesn't look at all like the ProRaw profile. Compared to the Adobe profiles, it looks most like Adobe Standard. 

Another curiosity: When I today re-merged another set of my photos from that hike, which had exhibited the same problem yesterday, the problem did not recur. LrC says the output file's profile is ProRaw, and the photo looks ProRaw, which was obvious during the merge preview. I'm not sure what changed since my prior merge of these photos, but I had done something to the first of the three input photos. LrC shows that its Metadata Date is yesterday, during my experiments. I might have inadvertently run exiftool on it, though when I tried today to perform your suggested exiftool recipe (export metadata, run exiftool to set profile, read metadata, merge) on the first photo of my stubborn first set of photos, it didn't help. The result was still missing the embedded color profile. I've added this group of files to OneDrive as "set 2 - result is ProRaw", and I've re-organized the older files into "set 1 - result is not ProRaw". The link again is OneDrive: Apple ProRaw merge color profile. 

[johnrellis]

While poking around in your latest sample files, I noticed that the first Pano was created by LR 12.3 and the second two by 12.4:

Note that 3632-Pano.dng has Process Version 5, even though it was created by LR 12.4.  That appears to be because the first input file 3632.DNG is Process Version 5, while the second and third input files are Process Version 6 (not sure how that might have come about).

My experiments were all done with LR 12.4 / Process Version 6.  So this might account for the different behaviors we're seeing.

Anyway, Adobe has acknowledged the bug and will hopefully sort things out soon.

PS: Each time you run Merge, LR will pick slightly different merge boundaries, resulting in slightly different-sized panoramas. This is because the merge algorithm has randomness built-in, presumably to make the choice of the merge boundaries more efficient.  As a side effect, if you select the Auto Settings option, the resulting develop settings will also be slightly different.

[wallacewhite]

Thanks, @johnrellis. I hadn't recalled what version of LrC I was running when I imported these photos and initially merged them, but I did update LrC (to 12.4) after I noticed the profile problem and before I started this thread, in hopes of fixing it. Then, as we've been trying things, I downloaded my source images from the OneDrive folder that I shared and imported them into LrC again, just to make sure I was working with the same files that you were. 

Does LrC depend on the Camera Raw files that the Creative Cloud desktop app lists as a separately updateable item? In the past, I think I've sometimes updated LrC without updating any of my other Adobe CC apps and dependencies (I mainly use just LrC), but when I updated LrC to 12.4, I did update Camera Raw as well. Could that explain the tags for Process Version 11.0?

That's interesting about the intentional randomness in the merge process. Thanks.

[johnrellis]

"Could that explain the tags for Process Version 11.0?"

Possibly -- the first Creative Cloud app to edit the photo and save metadata back to the file will write its current process version into it. The process version won't change to "the latest" version until it's edited by a CC app that is using that version.  Lot's of room for confusion here 😆

[wallacewhite]

OK. Thanks so much, @johnrellis, for bringing your wealth of knowledge and your helpfulness to this. Increasingly I just Google the problems I encounter, figuring someone else must have been through them already, so I'm glad to be reminded that posting in a forum can be so helpful.