Weird Image View Quality Thing - Lightroom 3

[Swisstony10]

I'm a recent convert to Lightroom - having never really got to grips with the trial version I had of LR2 (didn't really get a chance to play with it properly), I thought I'd give the trial of LR3 a go, and ended up buying it.

I'm having a weird issue with the on-screen image quality though - perhaps someone else has had a similar experience, and knows how I stop it from happening.

I open up an image in the "Develop" module, and have it set on "Y/Y Before/After" view. The image that I've just noticed it on most is one of a band I shot at a festival last year. The first thing I want to do is kill the noise, since I was shooting at high ISO, so I let LR do it's funky noise thang, and then add a little sharpening. Everything's sweet. Next I tweak the exposure a little - maybe up the brightness a tiny bit, use the recovery slider a little, that kind of thing. And now, each time the "After" image reloads, the quality is appalling - worse than the original image. If I then zoom the view to 1:4, for example, when the image reloads it's back to the clear noiseless crisp image I was expecting. A further tweak, and the image reloads to a noise-ridden pixellated image again, which I can cure by dragging the zoomed image around the view area a little and letting it reload again.

The thing is, I don't want to have to always process a zoomed image, sometimes I want/need to be able to see the whole thing.

Has anybody else experienced this bizarre display of bogus image quality reduction?

Russ.

[BigFuzzy]

Could have to do with what quality "preview" you had LR load up. When you import your images into the Lightroom library, do you have it create 1:1 previews?

I do, and I don't seem to have this issue as you describe it. Yeah, it takes a lot longer time to import images into your library since it has to render 1:1 previews, but it's worth it and may be your issue. Can't say I'm a LR pro though, so others may know the issue.

[jdepould]

You're doing it backwards. Sharpening/denoising come last (that's why they're at the bottom). That may or may not affect your preview quality. I can say it's not a normal LR behavior, I've been using it since Beta 1 and it hasn't happened to me.

[sk66]

It's not normal. I would suspect it's a display math/ screen resolution/ graphics card issue.