Hello everyone. This may be a bit off-topic for the DAM forum, but I'm having a problem with the way my RAW images display in CS4 and I'm looking for answers in every possible place I can think of. My hope is that, since many of the people that frequent this forum are familiar with the ins and outs of a a color managed workflow, maybe someone here will be able to provide an answer to my problem.

I've been building up an image collection for some years now. A couple of years ago I discovered the DAM book and started applying the workflow suggested by Peter, which has worked really well for me. To keep a color managed workflow I bought a Pantone Huey Pro calibrator and up until last December I was using it on my older laptop LCD screen. I know that an LCD screen is not ideal for this type of work, but I was able to get really good results by keeping the screen calibrated (plus I live in a small flat in London and don't have room for a desktop computer+bigger screen). I sent quite a few images to be printed at a digital photo lab and they came back just the way I expected. I work on the sRGB color space, which is the same one that the photo lab uses. And as the colors in my prints were coming back accurately it seemed to me that my color worflow was correct.

Around December last year my old laptop died, so I decided to buy a new Dell M6400 Covet with a 17-inch WUXGA RGB LED screen. I received it, calibrated the screen with the Pantone Huey Pro and was ready to work again. However when I looked at my image collection all of my RAW images appeared shifted in color (muted reds and with a slight greenish cast). They would look like that across all of CS4 applications (Photoshop, Bridge and ACR). For a moment I thought it may be a problem with the screen or the calibration, or even my eyes, but then I compared some of the RAW images with their corresponging JPEGs (extracted from the RAW files last year). These JPEgs had looked the same as the RAW images when they were extracted. When comparing I saw that the JPEGs indeed looked correct, but not the RAW images. This happens with all of my RAW images, which come from 3 different cameras: a Nikon D70, a Nikon D300 and a Panasonic Lumix LX3. All of the images have been converted to DNG, but I tested with a few original RAWs that I still had around and they show the same problem.

Furthermore, I took some of the RAW files & JPEGs to my workplace, where they run CS3 licenses. When I looked at them there both the RAW files and the JPEGs looked correct, and more importantly, they looked the same.

Just to test whether it was an issue introduced with CS4 I installed CS3 at home, but it too showed the same problem.

Also, if I now extract a JPEG in my home computer from one of my RAW images the new JPEG looks the same as the RAW image (that is, wrong, but the same). So it seems that somehow my RAW images are getting "rendered" differently than they used to. I've made sure I'm using the embedded camera profile in ACR, so that doesn't seem to be the issue either.

I've also made sure I have the latest drivers for my nVidia Quadro FX 3700M card, and the latest updates to CS4.

At this point I've been in contact with Adobe UK for well over a month, but they haven't been able to offer any solutions. I've also contacted Huey but so far they haven't been able to figure it out either. I've looked up and down in the web and asked in forums, but to no avail. I'm at my wits end, and I have been unable to work on any of my new images for a couple of months because any color work I do on them will almost surely be incorrect.

If anyone has any ideas of what the problem may be and how to solve it I would love to hear them.

-Jorge

I guess you mean by extracting the embedded JPEG? I haven't tested that yet. I'll give it a try tonight and compare the resulting JPEG with the original. If it's the same I suppose I can safely blow away the original JPEGs.

By the way, is there any information on when this new DNG implementation would be released (or even just on whether it's indeed in the works)? I've looked at the adobe forums but can't find anything.

Thanks for the reply Dan. It all makes sense now.

As you say, hopefully this will get fixed in a later release. I just hope that I'll then be able to "reconvert" those DNGs that I've made from my JPEGs to the newer, leaner DNG version.

-Jorge

I've started converting some old JPEG images to DNG for consitency reasons. I'm using ACR to do this and it works well... mostly. The only thing is that I'm taking a huge size hit when I convert the files. I mean, I was expecting them to be bigger, but I'm talking about JPEG files of 3MB becoming 12MB files when converted to DNG. Is it really normal for them to become 4 times the size?

The thing that confuses me is that RAW images shot at about the same resolution are about 4MB in size when converted to DNG. Why then when I start from a JPEG image I end up with a 12MB DNG file? Am I doing something wrong?

By the way, these are the conversion options that I'm using (as recommened by Peter in the DAM book):
JPEG Preview: Full Size
Compressed (lossless): ON
Image Conversion Method: Preserve Raw Image
Embed Original Raw File: OFF

-Jorge

Sorry, forgot to sign.

-Jorge

Seems much faster from over here. Good one!