ACR and Lightroom

[Bryan Conner]

I have seen on another forum where a person has stated that Lightroom 4 and ACR 7 now have the same raw conversion engine.  This person stated that this corrects a problem that existed previously.  He states that the problem was that an image exported from Lightroom into Photoshop would experience a shift in either color tones or contrast.  Is this true?  I don't recall a problem such as this existing.  And, if it did, how could this happen if proper color management practices are observed? My opinion is that this person is misunderstanding, or is misinformed.  I do not want to correct him without knowing for sure myself.  As Mark Twain said, it is better to keep your mouth closed and be thought of as possibly being an idiot than to open your mouth and remove all doubt

I googled this and could not find any answers.

[Schewe]

There are a lot of people on a lot of forums that don't necessarily what they are talking about and 2nd or 3rd hand translations of those posts are even less useful. When and where did you read this?

LR and ACR, as long as they are in version step match processing...if ACR and LR are out of phase, then you need to have LR render the image into Photoshop. ACR 7 with the beta of Photoshop CS6 pretty much matches the processing pipeline of LR 4. LR 4.1 will require ACR 7.1 to be in phase...we have an RC of LR 4.1 but Adobe hasn't released CS6 yet so there's no public beta of ACR 7.1. That might change not too long after CS6 ships next Mon, May 7th.

[Bryan Conner]

There are a lot of people on a lot of forums that don't necessarily what they are talking about and 2nd or 3rd hand translations of those posts are even less useful. When and where did you read this?

LR and ACR, as long as they are in version step match processing...if ACR and LR are out of phase, then you need to have LR render the image into Photoshop. ACR 7 with the beta of Photoshop CS6 pretty much matches the processing pipeline of LR 4. LR 4.1 will require ACR 7.1 to be in phase...we have an RC of LR 4.1 but Adobe hasn't released CS6 yet so there's no public beta of ACR 7.1. That might change not too long after CS6 ships next Mon, May 7th.

http://www.digitalmonochromeforum.co.uk/showthread.php?4242-Camera-RAW-6.7-Final&p=25075#post25075  is the thread.   It is a current discussion.

[Schewe]

It is a current discussion.

Correct me if I'm wrong but that thread had ZERO to do with exporting from LR to Photoshop...it's all about camera compatibility, right? It has nothing to do with your OP indicating "an image exported from Lightroom into Photoshop would experience a shift in either color tones or contrast"...

Spread fact, not rumor...

[Bryan Conner]

Correct me if I'm wrong but that thread had ZERO to do with exporting from LR to Photoshop...it's all about camera compatibility, right? It has nothing to do with your OP indicating "an image exported from Lightroom into Photoshop would experience a shift in either color tones or contrast"...

Spread fact, not rumor...

Yes, it began as an announcement that ACR 6.7 was available.  I am not sure if you read the posts contained in the thread, but in post #12, the OP stated "Lets take Lightroom and Photoshop. Prior to the release of Lightroom 4, whenever you sent a file from Lightroom to Photoshop you always got a shift in either colour, tones or contrast. The reason for this was because both pieces of software were using different rendering engines for the raw conversion. With the introduction of Lightroom 4 and Photoshop CS6, both pieces of software now use the exact rendering engine and algorithm to make the conversion so this means that you should see no difference going between each application."

My intentions here were not to spread rumor (and I hope that your comment "Spread fact, not rumor" is not directed at me), my intention was to find out the truth.  Thanks for clearing it up for me that the info in the post is actually BS.