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Library preview won't update after PS Edits

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Linwood Ferguson

Linwood Ferguson
Lightroom Guru
Joined
Jan 18, 2009
Messages
2,587
Location
Fort Myers, FL
Lightroom Experience
Advanced
Lightroom Version
Classic
Lightroom Version Number
9.2.1, PS 2020 21.1.2
Operating System
  1. Windows 10
I am having a continual battle with LR not picking up the photoshop edits in Library.

Scenario: I'll select 4-8 images in grid, do edit-in photoshop, original. I edit them and save them one by one, then go back to the library grid and maybe half will show the edits. If I select loupe sometimes it appears, if I zoom 1:1 sometimes the edit appears, sometimes not. If I go into develop it always appears (may take a second or so). But if I exit from develop to library it still will show the old.

I can build previews, build 1:1 previews, and even exit lightroom and restart it and it still may or may not show.

The only 100% reliable way I've made them show is to exit LR, and delete the preview folders entirely. That's sort of a nuclear option.

Don't misunderstand -- the converse is that sometimes each of these steps restores the image as edited. But I just had one that only came back after exiting lightroom, and caught it on video if anyone wants to see.

I have tried this both with GPU on and off, same behavior. I have purged the ACR cache without impact (let me be precise -- I purged it, and subsequently still had the issue, by the time I thought to try that everything was displayed).

Both LR and PS are the latest versions. These start out as 16bit TIFF's, some color, some greyscale, scans of old photos. Typically they are fairly small, many photos were only 2x3" or even smaller at 600dpi scans. I'm doing some restoration in photoshop.

I have had this happen in the past as well, but never this consistently, and it is getting really annoying. Most often it just takes a bit of time, but this is absolutely not a delay, it is simply not displaying.

Is anyone else having this sort of problem? Found any workarounds?

Linwood
 
The non-nuclear option would be to make the tiniest Develop edit which should force it to re-render the preview. That said, I am interested to know if anyone else is seeing the same, as I've heard another stale preview report the other day.
 
Yeah, like clarity up once, down again if needed. Something like that would work. I was avoiding LR changes as I was editing the original TIFF's and didn't want to confuse where the changes were, but trivial things would not be a problem. Thanks.

This morning I've been editing individually, and they all come up fine. I'm wondering if it is a side effect of doing it en-mass. And/or close individually. What I usually do is open a bunch at once, then individually as I finish them close/save, and I do not return to the LR screen (possibly relevant as some things update only when it takes focus).
 
Yeah, I'd do like 1 on noise reduction or something inconsequential.
 
Wow, now this is weird.

I just did six edits, and when I got to lightroom no updates.

So I went to the quick develop pane and hit +clarity once. Instantly updated to the correct image. No problem. Great (I think). So let's go down and end up net zero. Soon as I hit down it goes back to the incorrect preview. It's like it has history staged somewhere for the previews, which is NOT what I thought happened.

I repeated it over and over.

So I went into develop and did the same thing, did a +2 -- looked good. Exit to library and it's correct. Go into develop and go to zero again -- looks good, exit to library and it's back to the pre-PS version.

Bizarre. Just bizarre. Yes, obviously I can leave it at +1 or touch noise reduction or similar. This is more curiosity, and the idea that it's got cached old previews it returns to based (presumably) on the hash of the develop settings? Or it's stepping back in history because I specifically went back?

Hmmm...

+clarity, +whites, then -clarity, -whites: Back to pre-PS version.

+clarity, +whites, -whites, -clarity: Back to pre-PS version

So it's not just about stepping back one in history, it's recognizing it was unchanged, like it's got a set of previews and develop settings.

Did I mention Bizarre?

But the silence is interesting, it must be just me.
 
But the silence is interesting, it must be just me.
Hi Ferguson

I've been musing on this since you posted and decided I needed to break radio silence!!! I can't add anything that particularly helps, except that I have indeed seen this at times but never quite worked out why or what I manage to do to sort it. I have tried read metadata from disk (I'm talking after doing a Ps edit and it not updating), closing Lr, and also like mentioned making a small Lr edit too. I never quite worked it out and always assumed it was some cache issue.

I'll keep more of an eye and try and be more scientific in steps - but as I say it isn't something I've seen all the time, fairly random, but it went back to previous versions (Version 8 I recall)
 
@davidedric well, it sounds similar in that various caches are not identical.

While the above focuses on how to "fix" it, what I'm really curious is what causes it, because if we can find a reliable path to reproducing the situation it's more likely to get fixed.

So far I've been unsuccessful. Though I am suspicious that it has to do with changing colors; my impression is that it happens a lot more when, in Photoshop, I convert from RGB to Greyscale. But it's not consistent. I just edited six shots, and on the odd numbers I converted, and even I left them in color (they are B&W photos). One failed to preview correctly, it was a greyscale -- but the other two greyscale worked fine, so it doesn't seem significant. But I still think it's something like that.
 
So I went to the quick develop pane and hit +clarity once. Instantly updated to the correct image. No problem. Great (I think). So let's go down and end up net zero. Soon as I hit down it goes back to the incorrect preview. It's like it has history staged somewhere for the previews, which is NOT what I thought happened.

I suspect some of this is just held in RAM until you move onto other photos for a while. In theory, if you do your + 1 and then build previews and then -1 and then build previews (via menu command) it should work. If you just do +1 and then -1, it knows you didn't really do anything.
 
First time commenter here. I found this thread searching for a problem I hit today.

Editing .tif file in PS independent of LR, even though the photo is catalogued in LR and had previously been edited from there. I just thought I'd skip LR and edit directly in PS to have one less program hogging memory.

After doing that and opening LR, viewing the photo in Develop module looked as I expected. But in Loupe view, I saw an older version, before today's PS edits. No amount of toggling between views or futzing with delete/generate previews menu options would make the Loupe view update.

Upon reading this thread, I did Clarity -1 in LR and the Loupe view updated to include the independent PS edits. Yay!

Questions I have
1) is it considered OK to edit an LR-catalogued .tif in PS, outside of going through LR, and can I expect LR to pick up my changes next time I view the picture from LR? Or can't LR handle that workflow?
2) while I'm grateful to find a workaround here, is this considered an LR bug, that it displays different views between Loupe and Develop?
 
Hi iSeek, welcome to the forum.

Editing the TIF directly in PS is fine, but hits the problem you've come across, as Lightroom doesn't notice that the file has changed, so it has no reason to update its Library module preview with the changes. Making a tiny change forces the preview to update, as you've found.

Loupe vs. Develop being different is normal. The standard and 1:1 previews used throughout Lightroom are stored as jpegs and only updated when something's known to have changed, like making a small Develop adjustment. Develop module, on the other hand, generally loads from the original file (only when zoomed in, if preferences are set to use smart previews and a smart preview exists) so it makes sense that would show the external changes.
 
Editing .tif file in PS independent of LR, even though the photo is catalogued in LR and had previously been edited from there. I just thought I'd skip LR and edit directly in PS to have one less program hogging memory.
There is another aspect of your question I want to highlight in case not obvious. If "been edited from there" means you used the lightroom editor to change the develop settings, it is important to realize those changes are not inside the TIFF but non-destructively inside of Lightroom, and may yield an unexpected problem if you edit the underlying TIFF.

Scenario:
  1. Import a TIFF into lightroom.
  2. Using lightroom you apply an exposure increase (brighter) of 1 stop.
  3. <<<later>>>
  4. Open Photoshop and edit the underlying TIFF. You notice the image is a bit dark and brighten it by 1 stop, save the TIFF
  5. <<<later>>>
  6. You go back into lightroom and find the image is now 2 stops brighter because they were additive, one destructive one non-destructive.
My apologies if this sort of thing is obvious, but some people have bumped into it.
 
On a related note, I've found a delay on the update of the the preview after coming back from an external editor like Topaz. Seems to take the background processing some time to complete sometimes. Not sure if it doesn't get kicked off properly on the return or there is a timer about when it checks for preview updates.
 
There is another aspect of your question I want to highlight in case not obvious. If "been edited from there" means you used the lightroom editor to change the develop settings, it is important to realize those changes are not inside the TIFF but non-destructively inside of Lightroom, and may yield an unexpected problem if you edit the underlying TIFF.

Scenario:
  1. Import a TIFF into lightroom.
  2. Using lightroom you apply an exposure increase (brighter) of 1 stop.
  3. <<<later>>>
  4. Open Photoshop and edit the underlying TIFF. You notice the image is a bit dark and brighten it by 1 stop, save the TIFF
  5. <<<later>>>
  6. You go back into lightroom and find the image is now 2 stops brighter because they were additive, one destructive one non-destructive.
My apologies if this sort of thing is obvious, but some people have bumped into it.

Thank you both for the quick and helpful responses! They definitely help me understand and be more confident with Lightroom.

Thanks for spelling out this scenario. I am "aware" of this possible issue, but it's not yet "obvious" to me how all this works, so your real-world example reinforces my understanding.
 
(adding more details in response to @Denis de Gannes ' question.)

In case my description of the sequence I followed that resulted in LR Loupe not showing my PS edits, here's what I did:
  1. import DNG from camera to LR
  2. edit photo in LR
  3. from within LR, edit photo in PS, including LR adjustments. Results in TIFF in LR. Everything is fine to this point.
  4. without running LR, open the TIFF in PS in PS and edit it some more
  5. open LR, observe that picture in Loupe is stale, but Develop shows PS edits from (4)
  6. in LR Develop, do Clarity=-1. Now, photo updates in both Loupe and Develop and is consistent and current.
I understand what's happening if LR Library module isn't designed to detect that an image was edited outside of PS.
 
At iSeek, my post was directed at the original post and was not able to follow/understand the discussion in the thread.
I have not tested what you have observed, I am not on my home computer, but follow what has happened.
LrC by default reads and writes to its Catalog file so the info is in the Catalog. PS on the other hand writes to the file so info is not in the Catalog,
LrC does not know what has been done with your second edit in PS. Hence what you experienced in the Library Module.
Develop Module is different and it re-renders the tiff and becomes aware of the PS changes.
Hope this makes sense.
 
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