Detail in shadows disappear

It's worse than I thought. Even using "Straighten" makes the shadows darker. I also used Onyx to clear the Application caches, and it did not fix it.

Dan

I do see a difference, where the shadows are
significantly darker. But if I'm working on my own
photo, and I check the "Levels" box, no change is
made at all unless I actually adjusted the levels
sliders, or hit one of the auto-levels buttons.

Exactly! I expect no change until I start adjusting the levels.

So I
too am a bit confused when you say that the setting
for Levels is at the default. As far as I an tell,
the default is "do nothing-make no changes".

By default I mean the values set when you click the curved arrow or "Reset." Those should do nothing.

From
the photo it looks like the black point has been
shifted, sending more dark values to black and
compressing more of the shadows, while the first one
has not had such an adjustment.

I think you are right.

What happens if you "remove all adjustments from
selection" and then check the levels box? Nothing
should happen, since no levels adjustment was
actually made.

If I remove all adjustments, I get back the detail. As soon as I check the checkbox the shodows become darker.

Dan

Dual 2 GHz G5, 2.5 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 6600 with 256MB GDDR SDRAM Mac OS X (10.4.7) 23" Cinema Display, Pantone huey

When you say Levels is at default, do you mean 0.00,
0.25, 0.50, 0.75 and 1.00, or Auto-Levels? Is
Shadow/Highlight in use?

By default I mean the same as clicking on "Reset to default" the curved arrow. Auto-Levels is not set and Shadow/Highlight is not in use.

I did some further experimentation with Shadow/Highlight. Read my post about that.

Thanks,

Dan

Dual 2 GHz G5, 2.5 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 6600 with 256MB GDDR SDRAM Mac OS X (10.4.7) 23" Cinema Display, Pantone huey

I did a little bit more investigating and I am getting closer to the root of the problem. It has something to do with the Monitor Profile.

I am using Pantone huey (it monitors the ambient light and adjusts the monitor accordingly). I thought that might be the problem. So I turned it completely off, then rebooted the computer.

In System Preferences/Displays I chose "Cinema HD" and the problem disappeared. I chose "huey D65 G2.2 A0.00" and the problem reappeared. But, wait!

I used "manual" calibration and created a profile called "Cinema HD Calibrated." It looks a lot like "Cinema HD" only a little bit darker. BTW, the huey profile looks a little warmer. I looked at all three profiles, the huey specifies a black point, the two Cinema HD do not have a black point.

Unfortunately, the "Cinema HD Calibrated" profile behaves exactly like the huey: as soon as I start making an adjustment, the shadows become darker. I get back to no adjustments, and I see the detail in the shadows again. Only the "Cinema HD" profile that came with the system does not exhibit this problem.

It's hard to explain and as they say "a picture is worth a thousand words," so here it is what I am experiencing:

http://homepage.mac.com/dantimis/Aperture/ApertureScreenShots.jpg

In the left column is what I see with the "Cinema HD" profile, in the right is what I see with the "Cinema HD Calibrated" profile.

In the left column is exactly what I expect, the shadows become brighter and brighter, as I move the Shadows slider from 0.0, to 1.0, then 2.0, and finally 10.0.

In the right column you can see that as soon as I move the slider to 1.0, the shadows become darker. At 10.0 the brightest part of the shadows are brighter, but the darker shadows are darker than the original, resulting in too much contrast. Like someone suggested, it looks like the black point has moved.

Also notice that the histograms looks "jagged" before applying any adjustments, and smooth after applying the adjustments. The histograms look different between the two profiles before any adjustments, but look the same for different profiles with the same adjustments.

I could use the "Cinema HD" profile and the problem would be solved, but I like the huey. I started getting much better prints from Photoshop after I bought it. I never printed from Aperture yet.

I tried other profiles too, Apple RGB, Adobe RGB, etc. The "Generic RGB Profile" is brighter than "Cinema HD." I can see more detail in the original picture, but again it gets darker as soon as I make any adjustments.

It's very frustrating.

Thanks,

Dan

Right at this moment I'm not viewing these on a
calibrated screen, but I can't see any difference
between the two. Am I missing something?

Try a brighter monitor profile, or increase the brightness of your monitor.

Dan

Clearly, Photoshop is compatible with the Large (LUT)
monitor profile but Aperture is not."

I could understand that Aperture is not compatible with a profile generated by the huey, but it is not compatible even with a profile generated by the "Calibrate" command from System Preferences. The "Cinema HD" profile that comes with the system is 812 bytes, the "Cinema HD Calibrated" is 2244 bytes, so probably the first one is Small (Matrix) and the second one is Large (LUT). If I calibrate with the expert options turned off, I get a profile that is 808 bytes long, but all I can do is set the white point and gamma.

Do not use Large (LUT) type profiles with Aperture.
I don't know if you have a choice with the Huey you
are using. You do have a choice in Eye-one Match in
how the profile is generated.

I don't have a choice with huey. It's a very cheap limited product, but it has done a good job for me so far with Photoshop.

Are there any programs that can take a LUT profile and generate a Matrix one?

Thanks,

Dan

I calibrated with Spyder Pro, and it seems to work
fine with Aperture. I wonder what's going on here?

I narrowed down the problem even more. It does not happen with RAW files, only with Photoshop, TIFF, or JPG.

What happened is I opened three RAW images with three different exposures from Aperture to Photoshop. I used layers and masks to combined them and saved everything in one of the versions opened from Aperture. I came back to Aperture and noticed the problem. I saved the same image both from Photoshop and from Aperture as TIFF (both 16 and 8-bit) and JPG. I re-imported these images into Aperture and I saw the problem every time.

Now I tried with a RAW image and I do not see the darkening of the shadows anymore. However, when I enable "Levels" it seems that there is a very, very slight change in the image - very hard to notice. But, there is a noticeable change in the Histogram. With the "Cinema HD" profile, there is no change in the Histogram, and the image stays exactly the same.

Maybe you could try this file:

http://homepage.mac.com/dantimis/Aperture/Na_Pali.jpg

I guess the lesson is when using Photoshop from Aperture, finish the job in Photoshop and don't do any more adjustments when you go back to Aperture.

Thanks,

Dan