Quality loss when opening a Lightroom photo in Photoshop

[andrewzuber]

I'm having an issue when opening a photo in Photoshop that I've worked on in Lightroom - loss of contrast, sharpness, and overall quality. I'm using the latest versions of Lightroom CC and Photoshop Beta. I had no issues with the previous photo I worked on in this session, and do the same thing I've always done - Photo > Edit in Photoshop. I've tried exporting a TIFF and a DNG and they're giving me the same issue, even though my Camera Raw settings match my Lightroom edits when I open it in Photoshop.

I've never tweaked color settings before so I'm not sure how to know if they match or not, but as I said, this happened in the middle of an editing session so nothing changed (as far as I can tell) from one image to the next.

Any help would be much appreciated!

[Jao vdL]

Screenshots would be helpful. It is quite impossible for quality to actually get lowered by "open in Photoshop". You might be misled by a difference in scaling algorithm or lagging preview generation.

[andrewzuber]

Here are two screenshots that show the difference after I've done my processing and then moved into Photoshop. I'm not sure if it makes a difference but the photos are on an external USB drive. 

[Jao vdL]

Are you talking about the difference mostly visible in the shadows? What you are seeing here is very typical for a problem with your monitor profile or a problem with the graphics card or graphics card driver. What are you using to calibrate the display? What monitor are you using? What are your preferences->Performance settings showing? Does it still show such a difference when you disable GPU acceleration there? 

P.S> you are working in Ligtroom Classic not Lightroom Cloudy which this forum is for.  

[andrewzuber]

I'm editing on my MacBook Pro which is what I've used for the last year or so; no external monitor, just the laptop. I haven't done anything to calibrate the display. Are you referring to preferences/performance settings in the software, or on my computer? I'm not overly tech savvy when it comes to troubleshooting, hence my asking what are probably fairly questions here. 

I wasn't even aware there were two different Lightroom forums! That's another annoyance for me - there's Lightroom Cloud, Lightroom Classic, Photoshop Beta, Photoshop 2024...I'd love to be able to just work with one version of each, but somehow I have both and I'm not sure what the difference is. Not a problem really, more just confusing.

[Jao vdL]

Is this a recent Mac Book Pro with Apple SIlicon? If so, you can get away with not calibrating as long as you turn off true tone and night shift. It should be really close out of the box (at least it is from my experience calibrating these. The out of the box calibration is really good. If this is an older intel based one, you might want to invest in calibration hardware such as a spyder or colormunki. That said, these don't have the issue I was referring to and should not do what you are observing. The corrupt profile issue mostly occurs on windows machines with external monitors. Also make sure your mac is fully updated to Ventura or Sonoma. There are some issues with the older operating system and graphics acceleration. 

[Rob_Cullen]

In your screen-clip you are not looking at the .ARW file that came from LrC.

How was the xxxx-2 document created and why?

[andrewzuber]

In Lightroom I went to Photo > Edit in Photoshop. This is the file that opened. Helpful to see that they aren't the same file, as I hadn't noticed that! But I'm not sure why it's happening.

[Jao vdL]

You might want to reboot the whole machine and try again. Lightroom and Photoshop sometimes get out of sync for the open in thing. Also try exporting a tiff file from Lightroom and opening that in Photoshop and see if it also changes tonality. From your screenshot, the display in Lightroom is consistent with what is shown in the histogram. What does the histogram in Photoshop look like?