More Lightroom Woe..

[Swisstony10]

I'm still having bizarre image quality issues with Lightroom, and I have no idea what's causing it. I've isolated (and thus eliminated) a few things from my investigation.

Here are two examples of exactly the same RAW image. Opening the file in Lightroom, the image is displayed like this:



If I export the image as either a TIFF or a Jpeg, and open it in Gimp, it looks the same. This is SOOC

If I open the same RAW file in Canon's DPP, it looks like this (which is how the scene I shot actually looked), and it exports as either a TIFF or Jpeg in the same quality:



So - I know that there's nothing wrong with the monitor or display settings, because everything works just fine in DPP and Gimp - it's just Lightroom that's doing something odd.

Anybody got any ideas, or had (or having) a similar experience?

Russ.

[cphoniball]

What are the base settings under the develop panel? It looks like the contrast is way too high in the first picture and it's causing posterization.

[sk66]

Your "default settings" are changing the way the image displays in lightroom.

[CheaperKings]

Originally Posted by sk66

Your "default settings" are changing the way the image displays in lightroom.

That's true. Just look through your settings and, somewhere in there, you can 'reset to default'. That should fix your problem.

[Swisstony10]

I agree - it does look a lot like a high contrast causing posterisation. However, everything is set to flat, I've tried resetting all settings, and even if I manually back the contrast right down to nothing, it doesn't affect it very much, and certainly doesn't make it anything like the SOOC version in DPP.

And on further investigation, I noticed that the thumbnails in the Library view look exactly the same (although miniature, obviously). Lightroom isn't set to apply any actions or settings on import, so I can't think what it must be doing, I'll have to carry on trying to get some sense out of Adobe support...

[sk66]

Is lightroom able to determine what color space to use/apply?
Since the OEM software and the camera lcd both look the same I am guessing they are using Srgb... Lightroom is suing a modified ProPhoto.

Apparently LR 2/3 both have some issues with the conversion to Srgb... I've seen it at times..I have more consistent results converting with PS..

[Swisstony10]

From what I've read on the Adobe support forums, it seems that Lightroom does have issues with posterising highlights. I've upgraded to the latest version (3.2) of LR, but it looks like there's not much I can do.

So - most pictures = Lightroom, backlit rock bands = DPP.