Distorted previews in standing (portrait) photos, when JPEG is used

[andersl]

Hi!

I have a problem with Lightroom where previews of standing photos (i.e. portrait mode) doesn't work properly. Lightroom will show me a badly distorted preview for a few seconds (or minutes, for large folders) before the correct preview is displayed. Sometimes, it starts with a correctly rendered preview, then it shows the distorted one, before (after a while) displays the correct one.

The distorted preview is rendered inside the standing frame, but rotated 9' degrees. The effect is that the picture is stretched out and on the side. (For the sake of an example, if the picture is a normal portrait, the preview will look as if somebody has pulled the ears out, flattened the head, and rotated the entire thing 9' degrees.)

This only occurs for JPEG or for RAW+JPEG pairs, but I haven't observed this for pure RAW files.

The preview problem can be seen in the flimstrip, in the library grid view, and when viewing individual images (Lightroom seems to correct the picture faster in the latter case).

The photos comes from a 2'D and a (old) D3'. The JPEG:s have been rotated with the programs thumbsPlus (5 and 6) and later with Breeze Downloader.

If it helps, I could provide screen-shot, or even files, that would demonstrate this problem.

Clearly, this greatly interferes with the task of sorting/selecting photos, so I'm really in the need for a solution to this.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Most likely it's the fact that they've already been rotated in another program that's causing the confusion.

Solution - render standard previews while importing, or select all and use Library > Previews > Render Standard Previews. Once that's completed, you should have no problem.

And welcome to the forum!

 

[Kiwigeoff]

Welcome to the forum Andersl, we hope you enjoy it and of course LR. To assist us in assisting you please take a moment to fill in your signature in the UserCP (top left of page). Thanks.

 

[andersl]

Most likely it's the fact that they've already been rotated in another program that's causing the confusion.

Oh, absolutely, but as a programmer, I think this would be easy to fix -- just avoid putting the "square items in the round hole", so to say. In this case, don't render a 4:3 bitmap into a 3:4 frame.

Solution - render standard previews while importing, or select all and use Library > Previews > Render Standard Previews. Once that's completed, you should have no problem.

Thanks, it seems to work!

It has a few drawbacks, though. First the .lrdata file grew to about 26GB. Secondly, it's a fairly time- and resource-consuming operation, which I would have to perform on all imported files, preventing me from "just start working" with them.


By the way, is this an "official" Lightroom forum (will this bug report be read by the Lightroom developers)? If not, how do I report this properly?

And welcome to the forum!

Thanks!

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Standard previews at 26gb? How many pictures are we talking about here? And you're sure you didn't render 1:1? You can drop the size/quality of standard previews in preferences if you wish to save disc space.

As I understand it, the issue is that it's quite correctly reading metadata that tells it to rotate (from the camera) but the thumbnail has already been rotated by the other program, hence it ends up the wrong way round. You won't have the same problem with images which haven't been edited elsewhere. It may well be on the engineer's list of things to fix, however there are likely higher priority items as this is only version 1, so it may be a while before that gets attention as it has such a simple solution.

And no, it's not an official forum but a number of Adobe staff do frequent the forum and problems are passed back, but you can always use the official feature request/bug report form to make sure it gets through. http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

 

[andersl]

Standard previews at 26gb? How many pictures are we talking about here? And you're sure you didn't render 1:1? You can drop the size/quality of standard previews in preferences if you wish to save disc space.

26''' photos (counting a JPEG+RAW pair as one) -- I started with a D3' back in 2''3...

However, I did set the preview quality level to High in a (failed) attempt to address this problem, maybe I will drop it down a notch and see what happens.

And no, it's not an official forum but a number of Adobe staff do frequent the forum and problems are passed back, but you can always use the official feature request/bug report form to make sure it gets through. http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

Thanks, I will drop a line there aswell, hoping that it will caught someones attantion!


Again, thanks for your suggestion!

 

[Mark Sirota]

The JPEG:s have been rotated with the programs thumbsPlus (5 and 6) and later with Breeze Downloader.

Most likely, one or both of these programs did an incomplete job of "rotating" the photo.

The EXIF 2.2 standard is dangerously complex when it comes to rotation. There is an Orientation tag, which tells which corner is ',' and which side is up.

Then there is a Rotation tag, and there are a number of other tags that depend on Orientation and Rotation. If one of these is changed (which is what programs like ThumbsPlus do), they must also change the other related tags if needed, and perhaps that didn't happen.

It's also possible (given the age of the camera) that they supported an earlier version of the EXIF standard. I haven't looked into whether any of this changed in newer versions of EXIF, but it's possible...

 

[andersl]

Then there is a Rotation tag, and there are a number of other tags that depend on Orientation and Rotation. If one of these is changed (which is what programs like ThumbsPlus do), they must also change the other related tags if needed, and perhaps that didn't happen.

Actually, I think that they rotate the entire bitmap, since it works with viewers that are not aware of the tags. However, I don't think that they rotate the embedded thumbnail, which would be my guess for the cause of the problem.

Note that older versions of TP (5) didn't set the orientation tag correctly, whereas newer versions (6), as well as Breeze Downloader, do. Lightroom, however, distorts the preview of both kinds, which would suggest that the orientation tag does not cause this.

Anyway, this is just speculations -- the only way to know for sure is to debug the application, which us mortals can't do... Too bad Lightroos isn't open source