Luminous Landscape Forum

Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Adobe Lightroom Q&A => Topic started by: Chris Kern on December 11, 2016, 01:36:56 pm

Title: Only Center Pane Visible
Post by: Chris Kern on December 11, 2016, 01:36:56 pm
Occasionally, for some reason I haven't been able to figure out and therefore can't reliably replicate, all of Lightroom's user interface panes except the center one disappear.  (See attached image.)  Some input of mine obviously is causing this; it doesn't happen spontaneously.  I haven't inadvertently set the application into Lights Out mode or hidden one or more of the control panels: it's just that everything is blacked-out except the center of the display.  I am unable to escape from this funny state using any of the interface-recovery methods I'm familiar with.  The only way I've found to restore the display to its normal state is to kill and relaunch the Lightroom process.  Can anybody out there explain this behavior, and tell me what to do to avoid it—or at least how to recover from it without restarting the application?
Title: Re: Only Center Pane Visible
Post by: Franz Strelsky on December 11, 2016, 02:01:50 pm
Try the keys F, F5 - F8

Franz
Title: Re: Only Center Pane Visible
Post by: Chris Kern on December 11, 2016, 02:24:07 pm
Try the keys F, F5 - F8

Thanks for the suggestion, but that isn't the problem.  The panels aren't hidden; they all are reported as displayed in the Window>Panels drop-down menu.  They are presumably still present, but the the panes which should be displaying them are all black.
Title: Re: Only Center Pane Visible
Post by: Franz Strelsky on December 11, 2016, 02:58:20 pm
Sorry, oft of ideas
Franz
Title: Re: Only Center Pane Visible
Post by: Slobodan Blagojevic on December 11, 2016, 03:12:18 pm
Tried trashing plist (preferences list) for Lightroom (on Mac - not sure what is the equivalent on Win)?
Title: Re: Only Center Pane Visible
Post by: john beardsworth on December 11, 2016, 03:34:29 pm
What version of Lightroom? Which operating system?
Title: Re: Only Center Pane Visible
Post by: Chris Kern on December 11, 2016, 05:17:17 pm
Tried trashing plist (preferences list) for Lightroom (on Mac - not sure what is the equivalent on Win)?

Not yet.  Probably worth a try.  (It will take a while to determine whether that works since I have been unable to replicate the user interface problem on-demand.)
Title: Re: Only Center Pane Visible
Post by: Chris Kern on December 11, 2016, 05:18:40 pm
What version of Lightroom? Which operating system?

LR 2015.8 and at least one earlier rev.  OS X 10.11.6.
Title: Re: Only Center Pane Visible
Post by: davidgp on December 12, 2016, 02:30:15 am
I think you are hitting the L key an putting Lightroom in lights out mode... Old way in Lightroom to see the image alone... Now everybody just press the F key to enter in fullscreen (I think it was introduced in Lightroom 5)


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Title: Re: Only Center Pane Visible
Post by: davidgp on December 12, 2016, 02:58:59 am
Ok, I just tested it... It is not the lights out... Ignore my previous message...


http://dgpfotografia.com
Title: Re: Only Center Pane Visible
Post by: john beardsworth on December 12, 2016, 04:07:28 am
LR 2015.8 and at least one earlier rev.  OS X 10.11.6.

What's the graphics card? And RAM? I ask because I have occasionally seen something similar on my MBA but not on my PC, and the Air only has 4 gb RAM and just a built in GPU.
Title: Re: Only Center Pane Visible
Post by: pegelli on December 12, 2016, 04:08:19 am
I've tried reproducing the view you are getting but can't. When I do L in library mode it darkens everything except the pictures. In your case the frames around the pictures as well as the rating/moving/... toolbar are still normally visible.

Did you have the same problem with earlier versions of Lightroom? If not maybe do a reinstall of version 6.8 (or 2015.8 ) and see if that cures it.

You've probably tried hitting "escape" as well as L, but those are the only thoughts I can come up with.
Title: Re: Only Center Pane Visible
Post by: mbaginy on December 12, 2016, 05:22:14 am
Chris, I’ve encountered exactly the same phenomenon on my iMac some months ago.  It happened while in the develop module.  Hitting the “G” key and returning to the library module only rectified the situation momentarily.  Every time I returned to develop. The side bars blacked out.  Frustrating!

I closed Lightroom CC, and then started up again and all was fine for a day or two.  I thought it had something to do with RAM (my iMac has 8GB).  I kept turning LR off, then on again for a few weeks.  In the past four weeks or so, the problem hasn’t returned.  Maybe some update rectified a bug.  I can’t recall having more software running in the background than in former times.  It remains a mystery to me but hasn’t returned, I almost forgot – until I read your post.
Title: Re: Only Center Pane Visible
Post by: RickGraves on December 12, 2016, 01:27:18 pm
Same problem which started with most recent LR CC update. Only solution is to exit LR and start again. FYI: LR 2015.8. OSX 10.11.6. Mac Pro (late 2013) 3.5 Ghz 6-Core, 32 GB memory, AMD FirePro D500 3MB; only other program running in the background was e-mail. Seems to happen when switching between modules -- Library -> Develop or Library -> Print etc. No predictable pattern. Happened once after an import, too. Frequency is about 2x an hour now. Suggestions? Thx.
Title: Re: Only Center Pane Visible
Post by: mbaginy on December 12, 2016, 01:51:21 pm
Suggestions? Thx.
I know it's unsatisfactory, but my only suggestion is to keep exiting LR and then load it again.  Then hope the fault goes away after a while.  The phenomenon disappeared from my iMac after a few weeks.  Naturally I'd like to know what was the cause, but computers are sometimes beyond my understanding and remain mysterious.
Title: Re: Only Center Pane Visible
Post by: Chris Kern on December 12, 2016, 02:19:37 pm
What's the graphics card? And RAM?

Same problem which started with most recent LR CC update. Only solution is to exit LR and start again. FYI: LR 2015.8. OSX 10.11.6. Mac Pro (late 2013) 3.5 Ghz 6-Core, 32 GB memory, AMD FirePro D500 3MB. . . .

Same machine and specs (and 64 GB of RAM).

I have no clue what operating system APIs or shared libraries the Lightroom developers use to paint the screen.  It has occurred to me that perhaps the graphics processor(s) may be implicated in the problem, but that's pure conjecture.  I just posted a description of the problem in the feedback.photoshop.com forum.  Hopefully, somebody at Adobe will notice it, and check to see whether there is a known bug that seems to match this behavior.

Unfortunately, because I haven't figured out a way to deliberately make this happen, even if somebody at Adobe wanted to follow up I couldn't provide enough information for them to replicate the problem.
Title: Re: Only Center Pane Visible
Post by: Chris Kern on December 12, 2016, 04:45:20 pm
Victoria Bampton (https://www.lightroomqueen.com/) reports on feedback.photoshop.com that Adobe has determined this behavior is a bug (http://tinyurl.com/j4eyrcq).
Title: Re: Only Center Pane Visible
Post by: RickGraves on December 12, 2016, 09:04:32 pm
Chris, thanks for the update. Nice to know I'm not crazy.
Title: Re: Only Center Pane Visible
Post by: mbaginy on December 26, 2016, 09:13:23 am
Two days ago, this (missing side panels oddity) began again on my iMac.  Need to restart LR CC every two or three hours.  Rats!
Title: Re: Only Center Pane Visible
Post by: Chris Kern on December 26, 2016, 09:52:25 am
Two days ago, this (missing side panels oddity) began again on my iMac.  Need to restart LR CC every two or three hours.  Rats!

According to Simon Chen of Adobe, as of a few days ago this was still being investigated (http://tinyurl.com/jbb9pgc).
Title: Re: Only Center Pane Visible
Post by: mbaginy on December 26, 2016, 04:04:15 pm
Thanks Chris!  Nice to know Adobe are aware of the bug and are investigating.  It would be very welcome, if a fix were available soon.
Title: Re: Only Center Pane Visible
Post by: Chris Kern on April 11, 2017, 12:34:28 pm
Occasionally, for some reason I haven't been able to figure out and therefore can't reliably replicate, all of Lightroom's user interface panes except the center one disappear. . . . The only way I've found to restore the display to its normal state is to kill and relaunch the Lightroom process.

It took four months, but Adobe today released a new revision of Lightroom (http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2017/04/lightroom-cc-2015-10-now-available.html) with one or possibly more fixes that have "made progress" in resolving this bug.

(I wish Adobe would be somewhat more open about reporting interim progress regarding verified problems and describing the known cause(s)—especially in cases like this, where it appears the problem has not been completely resolved.  Aside from the benefit in customer relations, a little more transparency would help technically-knowledgeable end-users who encounter residual problems to replicate them reliably, and thus provide Adobe with more useful follow-up information.  I do give Adobe credit, however, for at least making available a public Beta Test version of this release to volunteers who were experiencing the problem frequently.)