Is it just me, or does Adobe camera raw 11 not recover high ISO shadows well?

[Kit Lens Jockey]

Am I going crazy, or is camera raw 11 really awful at recovering shadows in high ISO photos?

Recovering shadows with a photo that's about 20000 ISO from a 5D4 causes the dark areas to just look completely noisy/awful. I mean yes I know it's high ISO and a dark part of the photo, but this just looks terrible, like distractingly bad. I don't remember it being this bad with previous versions of camera raw. Is there any way I can re-load an older camera raw to compare?

 

[applecider]

This just begs for a before and after image, also the amount you are trying to push would be helpful. Don’t have answers to your version question. Have you tried comparing to DPP as well?

 

[YuengLinger]

Have you been on Adobe forums? Not many of us, I imagine shoot often at such high ISO. Even if I were to try, I'd have no comparison...

 

[ethanz]

I still have CR 9.12.1 if you want me to take a crack at it.

 

[privatebydesign]

Just go to the 'calibration' tab in ACR and then click on the arrow in the 'process' tab, you can use any previous version and swap between them.

 

[Kit Lens Jockey]

Thanks for the tip. Before I saw this, I remembered I had an old laptop that I had not upgraded to the new version of camera raw yet.

Sure enough, I was right. Exact same raw file processed with the exact same raw settings. The awful shadows are from CRAW 11. The better ones are from 10.3. Jeez Adobe, what happened??

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

I looked at some of my 5D MK IV images using process versions 1 thru 5. There was a big difference from version 2 to version 3, almost negligible differences for process 4 or 5.

Its certainly possible that certain images may suffer, so I looked at high ISO images. like2000 to 32000 and examined the dark areas and then I can see that the extreme dark area processing does change with the recent new processes in one ISO 32000 image of the moon while looking at the black trees on the horizon.

Process 4 to 5 affected the dense blacks at very high ISO settings. The images were so poor due to loss of detail that I would never notice except that I looked for changes in the histogram as well as in the image. Once I saw that, then I boosted the shadows and, going back and forth, process 5 boosts shadows more by default, so if I were boosting shadows in process 4, I'd need to dial back the boost with process 5. As soon as I did that, the images looked the same.

 

[privatebydesign]

Thanks for the tip. Before I saw this, I remembered I had an old laptop that I had not upgraded to the new version of camera raw yet.

Sure enough, I was right. Exact same raw file processed with the exact same raw settings. The awful shadows are from CRAW 11. The better ones are from 10.3. Jeez Adobe, what happened??

View attachment 181424View attachment 181425

You didn't learn to optimize your black point. Also, "the same settings" isn't relevant when you make comparisons, optimal settings are, don't forget you are dealing with a new processing engine, why should the settings be the same?

 

[Kit Lens Jockey]

don't forget you are dealing with a new processing engine, why should the settings be the same?

Because it's asinine to make it so that using a newer version of the same product yields results that could potentially be worse when processing a photo using the same adjustment settings as an older version.

 

[privatebydesign]

No it isn't! It is asinine to assume the same settings would result in optimal processing from two different engines. Would you expect the same settings in ACR and C1P to result in the same thing? Of course not. If the old version went to 10 and the new version goes to 12 do you change the scale you are used to to 12 or do you remap so the scale goes to ten but 5 is more than it used to be? Adobe took the second option, the scale is the same but the effect is greater.

The new version has lifted your black point to where it is making up light from very low signal strengths, the noise is colored so the resultant lifted black is colored the same purple as noise.

Just lower your black point and you will see that the newer version is better across the board.

 

[Kit Lens Jockey]

Would you expect the same settings in ACR and C1P to result in the same thing?

No, but I would expect the same settings in ACR 10.3 and ACR 11 to result in the same thing.

Anyway, I'll try what you suggested, thanks.

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

New adobe process engines do affect images, if someone needs to make prints starting with a old raw file, they can use the same process engine that it was edited with, or re-edit the image. Its always been that way, but the changes recently have been smaller ones.

My version, Adobe lightroom classic 8.0 does not automatically update the process version for all old photos, so they are not impacted, only newly imported photos use the latest. I you need to return them, just select a group of photos and set them to their older process engine.