Problem with LightRoom3 CA correction

[potterm]

I've been using the trial of LR3 for the past week, and am sorely tempted to buy it, but there are one or two issues that are bugging me, the most significant of which seem to be bugs in the lens profile assisted CA correction offered in LR3.

In what I'll admit are challenging images, I'm finding that LR3's CA correction leaves visible artefacts in areas where edge CA has been corrected. When the very same images are processed in CaptureNX2 the CA correction is perfect (at least to my eye).

Attached is an example - the first image is as processed by LR3 and the second is the exact same image pushed through CaptureNX2. Both cases are processed from RAW. Hopefully you can see that in the LR3 version there are very clear artefacts running along the top of the cliff edge (they almost look like sharpening artefacts, but they're not because I see this with sharpening turned down to zero as well). This is a challenging image because there is strong back-lighting, resulting in me having to use a combination of Recovery and Fill-in sliders in LR3 (and the corresponding controls in CaptureNX2).

The attachments are LR3 screenshots @ 200%, so I'll admit that I'm pixel peeping, but I submit to stock agencies occasionally and can almost guarantee that the LR processed image would result in a QC failure and rejection from at least one of the agencies that I use. Has anyone else seen this with LR3 (and did you get to the bottom of it)? The lens profile is the standard Adobe one shipped with LR3, not a user produced profile.

Now I'd be prepared to live with this and just process in NX2 for the odd problem image, but LR3 does not recognise anything other than ACR (i.e. Lightroom or Photoshop) as a valid RAW processor, so will only allow me to launch TIFFs into CaptureNX2 which is no use to me in cases like this. This means that I'd have to pre-process the RAW outside of LR3 and then import a TIFF into LR afterwards - not insurmountable, but I want LR3 to manage all of my images for me, so having to do things outside of the LR environment defeats the object of using it somewhat.

At the moment I'm using ACDSee Pro 3 for image management, which allows this and is very capable (but perhaps not quite as refined as LR3 when it comes to some of the management and publishing capabilities). I'm very impressed with LR3, despite it being quite slow on my PC, and what attracts me is the idea that I can do 99% of all image work within one tool, without having to launch out to others, but these two issues are causing me to pause before pressing the buy button.

Has anyone else seen this? Is there a work-around?

Thanks.
Martin

[sk66]

Have you tried using the manual correction instead of the lens aware mode?

[potterm]

Yes I did try with manual modes which improved the situation slightly but not significantly (and it was very fiddly to get right). However, since I posted I've been experimenting more and I've concluded it is all down to the Fill Light slider. As soon as I start to apply Fill Light to this and similar images then I start to see these artefacts appear where ever there's severe CA - they're even noticeable with the CA correction turned off completely. So I think I'm just going to have to use NX2 in cases like this, which is a shame (unless I can persuade Adobe to regard this as a bug and do something about it).

But on a positive note I did find a plug in for CaptureNX2 integration called Nx Tooey (robcole.com). This allows RAWs to be launched into NX2 from within Lightroom, automatically importing/updating the changes into a new JPEG file when you save in NX2, so goes some way to solve the problem for me.