A PSE Curiousity

Here's a curious thing that I discovered in a few spare minutes - not useful, but interesting. As is well known PSE contains a cut-down-to-the-basics version of the ACR/LR raw conversion machine. I took a junk photo and mistreated it in LR 5.5, doing all sorts of silly things with LR tools that PSE's version of ACR does not include. There is a dog in the picture, so I cloned him and made two dogs. I applied a Grad Filter, made it very dark and black and white. I threw in a couple Radial Filters and some brushwork. Then I did Ctrl+S to create an XMP.

When I opened that Raw (CR2) file in PSE 12, it opened in ACR 8.0 with all those crazy edits. Of course the editing was not in the Raw, it was in the XMP that ACR read and applied. But I had expected that ACR, being a "lite" version would apply what it could - WB, Tone/Color edits (Exposure, Clarity, Saturation, etc.) and Sharpening/NR - but would ignore the rest, the editing done by tools it lacks. But no, it was all there; the clone, the filters, the brush.

"Old-timers" may remember when, a bit more than ten years ago, Canon released the revolutionary first model of the Rebel line, the 300D. Some bright fellow among the designers had the idea to save time, work and money by giving it the 10D's firmware with the "high ticket" items locked and hidden. It didn't take long until it was hacked and unlocked and Canon learned a lesson. I think Adobe has done the same thing. PSE's ACR is the "full monty", capable of doing it all, but all the "added value" items are not accessible from the UI. Of course having discovered this is of no value whatever - the edited Raw still has to be converted to RGB in order to do anything more with it and using LR's Edit In is faster, but I did think it interesting.

Elements can do a lot - and yes its basically stripped down with the controls hidden; that's why there are a range of "unlock" downloads and purchasable 3rd party "upgrades"that can enable these features. Heck if you find a short-cut list for Photoshop you can do a fair few functions that otherwise you can't because there's no button for them in Elements.

This makes sense as when you do a normal Edit In from LR it uses ACR to render the image to RGB and open it in the pixel editing interface. This is before the RGB file is created. I would think there would be a lot of unhappy LR users if the image from LR was not correctly rendered. This is why you need to have fully version compatible versions of ACR and LR. When you use incompatible versions then you have to have LR render the image, creating the image file (.psd or TIFF) first then opening it in the PS editor.

I do not really understand why LR cannot do this without the need to use ACR. I can kind of understand the need for using ACR if you open as a Smart Object, as that requires two way communication, and a second copy of the RAW file embbedded in the .psd/TIFF.

Alan.

This same thing occurs between ACR for PS CS6 and the ACR for PS CC. There are features that the CC version of ACR has (like the ability to render the raw to any color space) that the CS6 version does not. However, if you open a raw in PS CC ACR and designate the render space as, for example, Lab that same export space will be available for the raw in the PS CS6 version of ACR, complete with the Lab histogram, and readout.

I would think there is a way to find the location for the preferences or some similar file that reads and writes such information and manually alter it so that one can enable these things on crippled versions.

kirk

tzalman wrote in post #17015996
Here's a curious thing that I discovered in a few spare minutes - not useful, but interesting. As is well known PSE contains a cut-down-to-the-basics version of the ACR/LR raw conversion machine. I took a junk photo and mistreated it in LR 5.5, doing all sorts of silly things with LR tools that PSE's version of ACR does not include. There is a dog in the picture, so I cloned him and made two dogs. I applied a Grad Filter, made it very dark and black and white. I threw in a couple Radial Filters and some brushwork. Then I did Ctrl+S to create an XMP.

When I opened that Raw (CR2) file in PSE 12, it opened in ACR 8.0 with all those crazy edits. Of course the editing was not in the Raw, it was in the XMP that ACR read and applied. But I had expected that ACR, being a "lite" version would apply what it could - WB, Tone/Color edits (Exposure, Clarity, Saturation, etc.) and Sharpening/NR - but would ignore the rest, the editing done by tools it lacks. But no, it was all there; the clone, the filters, the brush.

"Old-timers" may remember when, a bit more than ten years ago, Canon released the revolutionary first model of the Rebel line, the 300D. Some bright fellow among the designers had the idea to save time, work and money by giving it the 10D's firmware with the "high ticket" items locked and hidden. It didn't take long until it was hacked and unlocked and Canon learned a lesson. I think Adobe has done the same thing. PSE's ACR is the "full monty", capable of doing it all, but all the "added value" items are not accessible from the UI. Of course having discovered this is of no value whatever - the edited Raw still has to be converted to RGB in order to do anything more with it and using LR's Edit In is faster, but I did think it interesting.

It doesn't surprise me at all. This is the same sort thinking that allows such add-ons as Elements+ and Grants Tools to unlock normally hidden processes in PSE.

kirkt wrote in post #17016732
This same thing occurs between ACR for PS CS6 and the ACR for PS CC. There are features that the CC version of ACR has (like the ability to render the raw to any color space) that the CS6 version does not. However, if you open a raw in PS CC ACR and designate the render space as, for example, Lab that same export space will be available for the raw in the PS CS6 version of ACR, complete with the Lab histogram, and readout.

I would think there is a way to find the location for the preferences or some similar file that reads and writes such information and manually alter it so that one can enable these things on crippled versions.

kirk

It'd be interesting to see how that affected the xml file.

If I recall correctly, I too thought of this and checked and the XML file (sidecar) to see if it was affected in any way that would indicate it carried this kind of info. It did not. I would guess it is some sort of settings file that is used to recall the last used settings somewhere on the system.

kirk

Strange, you'd think something would show up in the xml that would point it toward the new features. Are you running 8.5 for ACR-CS6?