Hue Shifts in LR RAW Processing: Highlight Recovery

<p>I've noticed for some time that Adobe Lightroom causes major hue shifts with its 'Recovery' algorithm on RAW files. Most prominently, it causes yellows to shift to orange as you increase 'Recovery'... getting worse & worse the more Recovery you use.</p>

<p>This, however, <strong>does not</strong> seem to occur with flattened TIFF files.</p>

<p>Below is a comparison illustrating the problem. I took a Panasonic LX3 RAW file, then made a TIFF copy (in Lightroom), then applied 'Recovery' to a strength of 100 on both the RAW and the TIFF file. The original image is also shown for comparison:</p>

<p><img src="http://staff.washington.edu/rjsanyal/Photography/HueProblemsInLightroomProcessing.jpg" alt="" width="800" /><br>

<a href="http://staff.washington.edu/rjsanyal/Photography/HueProblemsInLightroomProcessing.jpg"><strong>Link to Full-Size Image</strong> </a></p>

<p>Hopefully the hue shift in sunlight reflection on the building should be obvious. To quantify the hue shift, I took resultant files into Adobe Photoshop CS3 & measured the hue angle. Hue angles are listed for a 5x5 square pixel sample within the red circle shown in each image.<br>

<br /> Clearly, applying 'Recovery' to a RAW file causes a huge hue shift, whereas applying it to the TIFF file does not.</p>

<p>I can confirm that this is not just a Panasonic LX3 RAW processing problem, as the same problem occurs on my Canon Rebel XTi RAW files, processed using either the 'ACR 4.4' DNG profile and/or any of the beta DNG profiles that attempt to emulate the original manufacturer's profiles (e.g., for Canon, 'Faithful' or 'Neutral' or 'Standard', etc.). The hue shift always occurs when processing RAW files no matter what DNG profile I choose.</p>

<p>I've noticed a similar effect occurring with 'Fill Light'. I can post more examples if folks need more convincing.</p>

<p>Has anyone else noticed this, am I doing something wrong, or is this simply something you guys live with?</p>

<p>I'd love to use some other method to bring down highlights in the image (as the Shadows/Highlights tool does in Photoshop), but I was never able to convince the LR devs during Lightroom's beta stages that they should have an option to decrease highlights while maintaining color saturation... something even <strong>Aperture</strong> , and of course <strong>Photoshop</strong> , has.</p>

<p>I love Lightroom, but to me, Lightroom's inability to deal with bright portions of the image/highlights is certainly its Achille's heel, in my book anyway.</p>

<p>Thanks in advance,<br>

Rishi</p>

<p>this is a known 'feature' of recent versions of Adobe Camera Raw algorithms. Affectionately known as 'hue twist'.</p>

<p>http://chromasoft.blogspot.com/2009/02/adobe-hue-twist.html</p>

<p>also, the same author at chromasoft wrote a Mac OSX profile un-twister called dcptool which might be useful to you</p>

<p>http://dcptool.sourceforge.net/Introduction.html</p>

<p>I was a participant in that Adobe thread or one of the threads that covered this.</p>

<p>Eric Chan, an Adobe ACR programming engineer and contributor to the discussion said this hue twist is intentional and is a feature that solves issues some were having without it. What those issues were with respect to color were never made known or at least I didn't stick around to find out. I don't have any color issues with ACR 4.6 and my Pentax K100D PEF's that are as bad as depicted in Rishi's post.</p>

<p>Howard,</p>

<p>Thanks much for pointing this out. Actually, the untwister is available for Windows too, in the same zip file. I have not had time to try it out.</p>

<p>I experienced something similar this week with the clarify slider in LR 2.3. I applied a pretty hefty clarity adjustment to an image, with the side-effect that pale yellows shifted strongly toward white. If you look at the top of the petals in the final image, you'll see the nearly-white tone:</p>

<p>http://dkoretz.smugmug.com/photos/504771543_azN4Z-X2.jpg</p>

<p>You can see something similar to the original color in the petal at the far right, which is out of focus and did not undergo much local contrast change.</p>

<p>I was completely perplexed by this, because I often do local contrast adjustments in Paint Shop Pro and had never noticed anything like this before. It's quite annoying. I hope that the 'untwisted' profile can avoid these distortions.</p>

<p>Thanks everyone for the help!</p>

<p>I'll try dcpTool, though, with these sort of hue shifts and Lightroom's inability to darken highlights without causing a huge loss in saturation that sometimes even renders highlights grey, I'm inclined to, *gasp*, switch to Aperture.</p>

<p>It's just that for landscapes, darkening skies & other highlights that have lost saturation is so essential that I can't believe Lightroom devs never got it right... otherwise, Lightroom's like a God-send :)</p>

<p>-Rishi</p>

<p>For skies I often use the Lightroom gradient adjustment feature or go to the H/S/L box and pull down the luminance for the blues I'm trying to darken. It's like a per color ND filter.<br>

For more complex adjustments I edit in CS3.</p>

<p>Highlight recovery in LR is terrible, but is fantastic in PS (shadow/highlight tool). I would never use the LR tool.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Highlight recovery in LR is terrible, but is fantastic in PS (shadow/highlight tool). I would never use the LR tool.</p>

</blockquote>

<p><strong>Thank you</strong> , Brett. Finally, someone agrees with me. I tried to explain this to Mark Hamburg on LR fora way back when, and he said he'd take a look at it, but clearly they never fixed it.</p>

<p>Bringing highlights down in 'tone curve' leads to unacceptable desaturation... a blue sky becomes gray.</p>

<p>Roger your method may sometimes work, but often a blue sky at sunrise or sunset has many other colors intermixed, and as you pull down the luminance for just blue, pixels or pixel regions of other colors are not changed leading to a noisy sky.</p>

<p>Day by day, LR is just turning into an asset management tool, not a photo editor. What with round-tripping to dcraw RAW converters such as RPP due to ACRs pathetic RAW conversions, then round tripping to PS for highlights adjustment, what the heck is LR worth?</p>

<p>I don't understand why it'd be so much trouble for Adobe to add in a little checkbox under the Tone Curve that allows for a saturation technique additionally when <strong>decreasing image contrast</strong> (read: move highlights/lights sliders to the left and/or shadows/darks sliders to the right) rather than <em>only</em> when <strong>increasing image contrast </strong> (read: move highlights/lights sliders to the right and/or shadows/dark sliders to the left).</p>

<p>-Rishi</p>

<blockquote>

<p>What with round-tripping to dcraw RAW converters such as RPP due to ACRs pathetic RAW conversions</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I shouldn't make blanket statements like that so let me rephrase to say that ACR just does a pathetic job with Panasonic LX3 RAWs... and maybe that has something to do with the lens distortion corrections, etc., I don't know.</p>

<p>-Rishi</p>

<p>Rishi,</p>

<p>There is a workaround within ACR and I think LR to overcome this hue shift using the HSL panel. Below is the hue twist version of your image.</p>

<p>These are the HSL settings giving the results shown:</p>

<p>Hue: Orange (+28), Blue (-5)</p>

<p>Saturation: Orange (+28)</p>

<p>Luminance: Red (-15), Blue (-10)</p>

<p>Note: Working on the direct Raw image may require variations on the numbers. Make adjustments to taste.</p>

<p> </p><div></div>

<p>I downloaded the Hue Twist software and applied it to the Adobe Standard and Camera Standard profiles with my 20D. Nothing earth shattering here- on many images there's barely a difference between the regular and untwisted versions of these profiles. On others odd hue shifts are removed but the result is skin that errs on the side of yellow/green rather than magenta, which isn't really an improvement. The Adobe 4.4 profile seems to be like the untwisted Adobe Standard profile but tweaked to be more pleasing. </p>

<p>In general, based on my limited testing I'd conclude that it's nice to have an extra tool in the toolbox but that the Adobe Standard or Adobe 4.4 profiles are more pleasing in more situations.</p>

<p>Roger: the hue twist is only obvious when making exposure adjustments and/or highlight recovery adjustments. With Adobe's standard profiles, the hue of oranges moves toward red as you increase 'highlight recovery'. With the 'invariant' version of the profile, the orange maintains its hue. Agreed that the 'untwisted' profiles are generally displeasing.</p>

<p>I love having the option of using invariant profiles. In fact, I use them more often than not.</p>

<p>Rishi</p>