quality issue in photoshop and lightroom

[Cosmin Margau]

I've posted this on POTN but so far no result so I'll try here too:

Im running into a bit of a issue with lightroom 2.0 beta and CS3 and its driving me insane!

I have an image I shot in raw and in lightroom it looks great, but when i export it it looks like crap! All the fine detail is gone! I've tried exporting at 100% quality, jpg and tiff and turned sharpening on and off and it still doesn't work, below is a picture of a side by side comparison of the files. Even exporting to PSD and saving in photoshop doesn't work, it still looks more detailed in lightroom with the raw file then in anything I export it with. The ONLY way ive found to make it look even half way decent is to take a print screen and paste it.

Color profile is sRGB saved at 100%

Any ideas?

left is how it looks like in lightroom, the right is how it exports
http://img244.imageshack.us/img244/9452/qualitylosshi7.jpg

[Daniel Buck]

noise reduction turned on? that can smear away detail. Turn off both luma and chroma noise reduction, see what you get.

[Cosmin Margau]

noise reduction turned on? that can smear away detail. Turn off both luma and chroma noise reduction, see what you get.

That made it a little better, i still lose a little bit of the faint wispy blue lines on the edges.

[Daniel Buck]

hm.... are there any other types of options when exporting?

[Cosmin Margau]

hm.... are there any other types of options when exporting?

there is sharpening, I tried on and off, I've also tried exporting as tiff, jpg, and other settings, the only one that seems to retain it all is DNG but then when i open the dng in camera raw and I export I lose it again. Maybe I should try canons program instead of adobe?

[Daniel Buck]

wow that's kind of strange, I've never heard of something happening like that! Is there a support forum for lighroom? I bet it's a lightroom issue.

[Aaron Kupferman]

You could maybe try exporting a 16 bit PSD. That sounds like a very weird problem. I'd try a variety of different file type, color space, and bit depth settings to see if you can find one that works for this image. It might be something to do with the deep blue being outside the color space of sRGB. Just my $0.02 of guesses.

[Cosmin Margau]

You could maybe try exporting a 16 bit PSD. That sounds like a very weird problem. I'd try a variety of different file type, color space, and bit depth settings to see if you can find one that works for this image. It might be something to do with the deep blue being outside the color space of sRGB. Just my $0.02 of guesses.

I thought that too, but the funny thing is if i take a screenshot, paste it in photoshop and save it, the detail is still there :confused:

[Wes Duenkel]

I thought that too, but the funny thing is if i take a screenshot, paste it in photoshop and save it, the detail is still there :confused:
Are you saving it in Photoshop as a JPG with an embedded sRGB ICC profile? I am by no means an expert, but I'd bet that has something to do with it...I fight this type of thing all the time!

Let us know if you figure it out!

[Cosmin Margau]

I just saved it with the default settings I always used and never had a problem, just with this particular image. In the end I never figured it out. Luckily the final product didn't have to be very high res so I just went with taking a screenshot of it and pasting it then saving that.

[Chris Bunjamin]

Never had that problem when exporting to photoshop but the way I export is either to export files to jpeg when doing batch (shot in sRGB) or using the function "Edit in Photoshop CS3" when doing one by one basis editing.

[Cosmin Margau]

I think the bug may have something to do with windows vista, whenever I save raw files as jpegs, I notice artifacts in gradients when viewing them in the windows picture viewer, however when I open them up in other programs everything looks fine.