Unwanted automatic cropping

[Jim McClain]

My first post here, my first time using RAW and my first time using LR (the free trial). I realize I am not much of a judge of quality developing programs and don't have any experience using the tools, but this is a problem I didn't cause. I've read other users of even older versions of LR that have the same problem.

Lightroom 5 has automatically cropped an image and I can't find a way to recover the lost pixels in LR or after I export it as a TIFF to [unnamed image editor that isn't an adobe product ]. Unfortunately, I deleted another RAW file after my initial selection of photos from the JPG output (I do RAW+JPG in-camera) because it wasn't quite the right composition for me. But if I had used that file instead, the LR automatic cropping might not have been a big deal because the image had room for it.

The weird thing is the output is still a 4000x3000 image, even though the largest resolution in the camera is 4000x3000. Does that mean the RAW file was automatically cropped AND stretched?

From my research, incomplete as it is, the problem seems to be in the camera profile. My camera doesn't appear in the drop-down list, but LR claims to support it - Panasonic Lumix FZ200.

My hope is one or some of you can help me with this. I like LR otherwise and it is in my top-two choices. Maybe I can customize the camera profile, or make manual settings (although I doubt that will work because the image is cropped before I even edit preferences or select any tools to edit and no tool can bring the missing portion back).

What was most troubling is a very short reply from an Adobe tech to one of the Adobe forum topics: "This is as designed." No other explanation and the tech didn't participate any further in that thread (sorry, I can't find the thread now to save my life).

I tried searching the LR forums dot net, but I couldn't find anything that discussed this issue. Thanks in advance for any support you can provide. I'd like to bump LR to the top of my list, if I can find a way to deal with this issue.

Thanks,

Jim

 

[Jim McClain]

The issue for me is surprise that Jim saw the uncorrected image in the viewfinder/LCD, that to my mind shouldn't happen.

As I said (or at least alluded to) in my last message, there's a high possibility that I was mistaken.

Maybe, because the camera in my hands was still quite foreign, I didn't have the picture composed properly and I did cut part of the sconce out. But ASP2 presented it to me with the lamp fully exposed, so I assumed I had a good composition and Adobe screwed me again.

I don't think there is anything wrong, in this respect, with my Lumix FZ200. I am not familiar enough with LR, or any RAW photo editor for that matter, to know what is right or wrong with it, but as it is designed, it presents the image to me as it should.

Don't make me admit I was wrong again. It ain't natural.

Jim

 

[Jim Wilde]

Hey....nothing wrong about admitting you were (maybe) wrong, especially on this forum. We've nearly all had to do it! :grin:

 

[Allan Olesen]

Yes Allan, that was all clear from Hal's post (which he made as I was typing my own....if I'd seen his post before releasing mine I would have added some additional comment). The issue for me is surprise that Jim saw the uncorrected image in the viewfinder/LCD, that to my mind shouldn't happen. As Hal pointed out, the expectation when the lens corrections are passed from lens to camera is that they are applied in "real-time" so that the user sees the corrected image either on the LCD in in the EVF, so composing on an uncorrected image is just wrong in my opinion.

I don't know how fast the processor is on this camera. If lens correction increases the EVF delay significantly - which seems plausible - it is quite understandable that the EVF is showing an uncorrected live stream.

 

[Jim Wilde]

You would think so, I agree...but I think the norm is for the EVF to always show a corrected image, and that's what Hal confirms with his mirrorless camera. In fact, I understand that the distortions on some of the MFT lenses can be quite extreme, so it perhaps wouldn't be surprising that the camera manufacturers would want to ensure that the user didn't get to see an uncorrected image!