Histogram question

[ernie]

I do most of my editing of raw files in LR. Then I save as a 16 bit tiff and store in the LR edits folder created by LR within the original folder. When I get time I then send the image to elements 5 for final edits. I notice a lot of the time the histogram in elements shows clipping on the left side. The histogram while in LR does not show this. It doesn't happen with every image (just most), so I haven't found a pattern yet. My LR settings are generally just minor adjustment of wb and/or exposure, clarity 1'-15, sharpen amount 4', detail 4'. I usually leave the tone curve at medium contrast and everything else is usually default settings. Occassionally I might adjust a luminance color or two.
Do others see this happening too, or is it just me and something I'm doing? The images look good, and when I check what's clipped (holding alt key) very little shows clipped. I'm more curious than concerned about why this is happening. Any ideas?
OH, ps. Nice to see this forum come about. The Adobe forum is FUBAR. Maybe they'll get it fixed someday.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

The histogram is based on the much larger color space that LR uses, whereas once you've exported, Elements is seeing it based on a much smaller color space.

As an experiment, do you have ACR available in Elements? Take one of the images that you're seeing this, and open it in ACR. Set the color space to the largest available - ProPhoto 16 bit I think in ACR - and look at the histogram and clipping. And now change it to sRGB 8bit and look at the histogram. See how it's changed? You'll most often notice it where the red channel is close to clipping in LR and then blows when you take it to a smaller color space.

And welcome to LR Forums!

 

[ernie]

Ah yes, color space. I should have thought of that, but didn't. Thanks. I use ARGB, but it is still smaller than what LR uses. And I didn't know the red would blow out first.

 

[LauriN]

Hi!

I see this is a really old thread but I've got exactly the same problem as egd5 with Lightroom 2. For example I'm working on a picture containing a sunset with a lot of red in the highlights. In LR there is no clipping shown in the histogram as the internally used colorspace is large enough to contain all the reds. But when I export the image to sRGB for the web using the LR export dialog and then open it in PS there is LOTS of clipping in the reds.
How can I avoid this clipping in the sRGB image without exporting it, looking at the "new" histogram in PS, correcting the exposure in LR, exporting it again, etc. until everything fits in the sRGB histogram?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Brad Snyder]

LauriN, Off-hand, I don't know the best answer to your problem, but I did want to take a second and say, Welcome to LR Forums.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Lauri, welcome to the forum!

I haven't got time to read back through the whole thread, but just try something for me. Select the file in LR and press Ctrl-S / Cmd-S to write your current settings to file. Now open that file in ACR in PS - right click > show in explorer/finder and then open in PS is probably quickest. Now select ProPhotoRGB as the colour space at the bottom of the screen - the histogram/clipping should now look pretty much like LR. Now switch it to sRGB - the histogram/clipping will now show what it would look like exported as sRGB.

From there, you have a couple of options.

1. Why export to sRGB? If it's for screen, the clipping isn't noticeable for most images, and anything else would ideally be a larger colour space anyway.

2. Yep, there's not an easy solution right now. For 'average' shots, you'll fairly quickly learn where things will start to clip when converting to sRGB, and it's usually the saturated reds that blow. That doesn't help a whole heap for this particular image though, but a little bit of experience and making sure the reds don't get too close to clipping in LR will generally do the trick.