Crop Tool causes odd Photoshop launch behaviour (?)

[bazography]

I have came across an unusual issue while using the crop tool.

I started with an original camera JPEG, used PM's Save As to create a TIF copy, then drew a crop on the TIF In PM. From that point on, opening the image in Photoshop results in the file launching in Camera Raw, which should not be happening.

To see if this was just a fluke, I started from scratch with the original image and tried opening it in Photoshop after each step. The original JPEG opens properly in Photoshop. After using Save As in PM to create a TIF, it still opens properly in Photoshop. But once again as soon as I draw a crop in PM it begins opening in Camera Raw.

I tried opening the image both from within PM and via the Finder, and either way the image opens in Camera Raw. Even if I remove the crop in PM the image continues to open in Camera Raw.

However, I have another image shot at the same time from the same source that does not have this issue. It makes me wonder whether image itself is somehow corrupt?

MacBook Pro (current generation)
OS 10.8.4
Photo Mechanic Version 5.0, build 13915 (a16ea99)

[Sven]

Hi!

Have a look in the Camera Raw preferences within Photoshop.

Open PS, Preferences, File Handling, Camera Raw Preferences.
At the bottom you will find a section for JPG and TIFF handling.

Most likely there is the option set "Automatically open TIFFs with settings".
What happens if you set this to "Disable TIFF support"?

Sven

[bazography]

Hi!

Have a look in the Camera Raw preferences within Photoshop.

Open PS, Preferences, File Handling, Camera Raw Preferences.
At the bottom you will find a section for JPG and TIFF handling.

Most likely there is the option set "Automatically open TIFFs with settings".
What happens if you set this to "Disable TIFF support"?

Sven

Thanks for the suggestion. You are correct about my Camera Raw settings, and selecting "Disable TIFF Support" in ACR causes my file to open correctly in PS. As I don't use ACR, I can leave JPEG and TIFF support turned off and that will work for me. Of course this doesn't address the root cause of the problem.

If I understand the ACR preferences correctly, "Automatically open TIFFs with settings" means that ACR will open TIFF files that have had ACR settings applied (or something thereabouts). If that is so, it would seem that the crop tool causes PM to write some sort of data to the file that makes it behave as though it was modified in ACR. Of course why this can happen to one photo and not another seemingly identical photo is a mystery.

[Sven]

How does you PM preferences look like for the IPTC / XMP settings?

In the folder where the images are, is there also an XMP-file with the same name as the tiff has?

[Kirk Baker]

Hi!

Have a look in the Camera Raw preferences within Photoshop.

Open PS, Preferences, File Handling, Camera Raw Preferences.
At the bottom you will find a section for JPG and TIFF handling.

Most likely there is the option set "Automatically open TIFFs with settings".
What happens if you set this to "Disable TIFF support"?

Sven

Thanks for the suggestion. You are correct about my Camera Raw settings, and selecting "Disable TIFF Support" in ACR causes my file to open correctly in PS. As I don't use ACR, I can leave JPEG and TIFF support turned off and that will work for me. Of course this doesn't address the root cause of the problem.

If I understand the ACR preferences correctly, "Automatically open TIFFs with settings" means that ACR will open TIFF files that have had ACR settings applied (or something thereabouts). If that is so, it would seem that the crop tool causes PM to write some sort of data to the file that makes it behave as though it was modified in ACR. Of course why this can happen to one photo and not another seemingly identical photo is a mystery.

Cropping adds metadata to the 'crss' (Camera RAW settings) key space.  It's what makes crops work between PM and Adobe products.  Your files are not being corrupted or damaged in any way.

-Kirk

[bazography]

Cropping adds metadata to the 'crss' (Camera RAW settings) key space.  It's what makes crops work between PM and Adobe products.  Your files are not being corrupted or damaged in any way.

-Kirk

But wouldn't this metadata either make all TIF files open in ACR or not? Given that 99.9% of my TIF files that have had a crop added in PM do NOT open in Camera Raw, I would assume then that this metadata is not normally supposed to force files to open in ACR. So when a TIF file with a PM crop DOES open in ACR, doesn't that mean the behaviour is not normal? Surely there must be some anomaly somewhere that is causing a few files to open in Camera Raw when most do not.

As mentioned, I don't use ACR and can simply select "Disable TIF Support" in ACR preferences, so for me at least it isn't a problem any more. I'm just trying to understand where the anomaly lies.

[Kirk Baker]

Older versions of PM did not write out a crop that worked with ACR/Adobe products.  I'd guess that any 'crss' namespace values causes the ACR plugin to kick in if you set Photoshop to process TIFFs/JPEGs with ACR.

Are your other images cropped with older versions of Photo Mechanic?

-Kirk

[bazography]

Well this is just plain weird.

I was wanting to test a few more things so I did a reset of my Photoshop/ACR preferences (putting them back to the way they were when this issue started) and the inconsistency is now gone. ALL images with a PM crop now open in ACR, and from what you have said I gather that is the normal behaviour.

This is definitely not what was happening before with identical settings. More than likely there was something wrong with my PS/ACR preference file that was causing the inconsistent behaviour, and the reset apparently fixed it. This wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had preferences randomly change in Photoshop.

Anyway, clearly there is no PM issue... sorry for the bother.

Cheers.