Shades of blacks issues on exporting

[Eddie750]

Is anyone having issues with exporting photos from Lightroom / Photoshop having lots of black in it in MacOS Catalina?  Smooth transitions now have a halo effect, particularly around shades of blacks.  This problem made it's appearence in Apple's 10.14.6 update which was confirmed by DataColor, the maker of my SpyderX monitor calibration, and now it appears to a lesser degree in MacOS Catalina.

The photos look fine in Lightroom.  Upon exporting to JPG (regardless of color profile) all the blacks look terrible.

I have a 2015 27" 5K iMac, along with a 27" Thunderbolt2 Monitor as my 2nd monitor. Both monitors have been calibrated, both monitors show the banding.

Prior to MacOS 10.14.6, this has never been a problem.  Any insights from anyone would be greatly appreciated.  I'm getting a bit nervous as now I cannot trust anything that Lightroom puts out.

[Earth Oliver]

you don't want to share examples of what the problem is? Or screenshots of your develop settings and maybe the histogram too? Are you viewing the photos outside of Lr in a color managed viewer? There's several things which this issue could be, but you're leaving out too much information for anyone here to be able to troubleshoot.

[Tony_See]

Thanks for posting all your OS system information Eddie

We'd love to see some of your issues captured in a screen shot and posted thanks.

Image banding (I'm guessing it might be that until we see your post reply) can be a compression issue: have you viewed these JPG's on another system perhaps?

[Eddie750]

Okay... I took two photos with my iPhone, that way it's impartial.

The first photo is how it looks in Lightroom.  The photo was converted to black and white.

The 2nd photo is how it looks when it's exported to a .JPEG and viewed as preview.  

As I mentioned before, this problem began (and verified) in the MacOS 10.14.6 update, only worse.  DataColor said that the issue was resolved in 10.15 (Catalina), however it still persists, although not as bad as 10.14.6

I haven't had this issue for years.  The photos I exported, looked exactly as they did in Lightroom.  Both my monitors are calibrated, both show the exact same banding.  

Any insight would be greatly apprecidated.

Banding problem with blacks in Lightroom/MacOS 10.15

[Jao vdL]

Does the problem persist if you turn off graphics acceleration in the performance section of Lightroom's settings?

[Jao vdL]

Only just noticed that the images look bad in preview, not in Lightroom so ignore the graphics acceleration thing! Can you post a screenshot of the settings in your export panel?  Can you post a jpeg that you exported? This likely has nothing to do with your screen calibration, nor your operating system, but simply the settings used to export the image. Preview is a fully color managed application and should show you the same thing as you see in the library view as they use basically the same display route.

[Eddie750]

Jao -

Man... do I feel like an absolute fool.  When mistakes are made, I will be the first to fess-up.  I was in the process of capturing a screen shot of my export settings, when I happen to see the "quality" slider set to 60%.  At some point I must have inadvertently set the slider back and reduced the quality.  I never use anything other than 100%.

Needless to say, I set it back to 100% and the banding/artifacts disappeared.  It looks fine in Preview, Lightroom, and even as a Wallpaper background.  So I'm back in business, and my worries have dissipated.  

Thanks Jao... That was such a basic, 101-class error on my part that I just didn't see it.  I'm relieved it wasn't anything worse.  I've been dealing with this for a while.

Thanks for kicking me in the right direction.  I'm going to go and slam my head between the car door a few times. 🙂

Thanks for everyone's input.  It was all greatly appreciated.

[Jao vdL]

Glad you figured it out. We have all made this mistake and I suspected the quality slider had changed. I will never understand why adobe seems to think 60 is an acceptable default setting for quality.

[Earth Oliver]

Jao, they're viewing their exports in Apple Preview... nothing ever looks good in that on anything but an sRGB display and they're using a display with P3 gamut.

[Jao vdL]

Preview is fully color managed. Your images should look almost identical. The only thing that preview does different than Lightroom is that it uses a not very smart scaling algorithm for scaling images down to the display resolution that will make almost any high resolution image look soft on standard displays. This is not relevant on retina displays as you can't resolve the pixels with your eyes anyway. It is also irrelevant for this purpose that the gamut is different than sRGB. Preview just uses the standard built-in system color management and will display what's in the images if the display profile is correct.

[Earth Oliver]

Wait. You're using Preview? That's an umanaged color application and shouldn't be used for previewing anything related to color. What profile are you using when you export from Lr? And if you're exporting to greyscale instead of rgb, the color will be even more unpredictable.

What happens if you import the photo back into Lr and view the color there? Or in Ps...?

[Jao vdL]

Preview is color managed like almost everything on Mac OS X.

[Earth Oliver]

this might hold a few clues...

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/271825/bug-macos-sierra-preview-quick-look-issues-with-ren...

[Jao vdL]

Yeah very true there are some bugs with some display profiling software using certain settings. They would manifest in all software on mac os x that uses the system color management libraries. The safe thing to do is to always set up calibration software to generate v2 matrix icc profiles. v4 LUT profiles can cause inconsistent rendering and are also known to not always work correctly in Lightroom. So the question could be what settings were used in the Spyder software in the advanced section - icc settings. They should be icc v2 xyz scaling.

[Jao vdL]

This is likely a problem with your calibration. Have you recalibrated after the Catalina upgrade?