LR 4 Major Problem

[GregJ]

I installed LR 4 yesterday which imported all of my LR3 Collections into LR4 -- about 5,000 photos in several Collections in one Catalouge. (I've only been shooting RAW for less than a year.) I had developed all of those thousands of shots in LR3 over the past year and had them where I wanted them. I was starting to think I was guru-level as a developer in that module, impressing myself with my slider prowess. The collections in LR 4 are a now a big problem. About one in ten of my pictures display with purple streaks highligted in bright areas of the photo. That is with the old PV2010 development engine of LR3. I did not update the collections with the new PV2012 engine, so I'm still showing the old LR3 sliders. I did try a few of the shots with PV2012, but the purple highlights did not go away and playing with the new sliders did not help. This is a disaster. So I opened up LR3 again and the pictures display perfectly. This seems to be LR4 problem. What could it be? I have hundreds of pictures with purple streak-like haze visible in certain areas.

Thanks,

Greg Johnson

 

[Jim Wilde]

Greg, I haven't seen any reports about such a problem apart from one over at the U2U forum.....having looked again I see that it was your post. To be honest, other than suggesting you upload a file (e.g. to yousendit.com) for us to see if we get the same results, you're better off following through with "Mad Man" Eric Chan.....get a file to him as he suggests. If anyone can identify the problem it'll be him.

 

[GregJ]

Jim, You won't remember, but you helped me a lot when I was first learning lightroom and took those thousand RAWs in Spain and was having a heck of a time putting it all together. When I get home tonight (back to my machine) I will play with it some more and send a shot to Eric. It is probably something stupid on my part. It looks like the pictures are showing clipping (but that is the first thin\g I checked -- turned it off).

 

[Sean McCormack]

Jim, You won't remember, but you helped me a lot when I was first learning lightroom and took those thousand RAWs in Spain and was having a heck of a time putting it all together. When I get home tonight (back to my machine) I will play with it some more and send a shot to Eric. It is probably something stupid on my part. It looks like the pictures are showing clipping (but that is the first thin\g I checked -- turned it off).

Hey Greg,
Check that Soft Proofing is off (Toggle S, or check in the toolbar). It has an overlay that's a bit like clipping.

 

[GregJ]

I apologize for this posting. I should have waited before bothering the gurus, but I freaked out when I saw that purple in the pictures after import from LR3. Anyway, I spent a few hours on LR4 last night after work and realize that this problem was my fault. I had over-developed (too aggresive on the sliders) some shots in LR3 when I was first learning the ropes a year ago. These pictures were in wide dynamic range situations -- severe lighting, like dark animals (moose) against bright green backgrounds in Grand Teton National Park, or the enterior of huge cathedrals in Spain and Portugal (dark walls, brigght windows). I have all L lenses and a great camera, but sometimes my skill is far behind the equipment and I am not a pro, although I have taken a hundred thousand photographs in the last 40 years of fairly constant shooting (scanning all of the slides now -- have been for 10 years). Anyway, this purple highlighting was prominent on many shots in many collections after bringing the collections into LR4. Last night, I updated several of them one at a time with PF2012, did a complete reset and started over with the new LR4 sliders and developed them from scratch. The results were fantastic! I noticed that on these wide dynamic range shots that the White Balance was off and requird the most adjustment. I don't use the tint slider much usually, but nudging it a little to the left added some green but took away the purple streaking. I corrected the green tint elsewhere on the hu, saturation and luminance sliders (or whatever they are called farther down the stack -- I don't have LR in front of me now and can't remember the slider names). LR4 and PF 2012 seems to pull out more dynamic range from the base RAW file than LR3 did. Maybe that is my imagination. I love LR4. The guys who do this are geniuses. Does this mean 20 years from now I will have thousands of differant RAWs using 10 differant development engines? Is LR 10 a deacade from now going to keep them all? Sorry -- that is another question for another time.

 

[Jim Wilde]

Great stuff, Greg! Thanks for reporting back, and well done for sorting it out....