Lightroom RAW image corruption

[8bit]

Recently, Lightroom has been doing this:



At first I thought the image had maybe been corrupted on the SD card, I have two cards in my camera set as mirrored for backup so I reimported from the other card and it was fine. Next time I opened lightroom, back to this. The image looks the same in Camera RAW, in Windows Photos it shows black where that one looks purple/green but in Faststone Image Viewer it looks absolutely fine so I'm not convinced it's actually a corrupted file.

I went back to a set of photos I shot last week and one of the files in there now looks similar despite being totally fine during a couple of editing sessions last week and weekend. Anyone know what's going on here?

[thebraketester]

8bit said:

Recently, Lightroom has been doing this:



At first I thought the image had maybe been corrupted on the SD card, I have two cards in my camera set as mirrored for backup so I reimported from the other card and it was fine. Next time I opened lightroom, back to this. The image looks the same in Camera RAW, in Windows Photos it shows black where that one looks purple/green but in Faststone Image Viewer it looks absolutely fine so I'm not convinced it's actually a corrupted file.

I went back to a set of photos I shot last week and one of the files in there now looks similar despite being totally fine during a couple of editing sessions last week and weekend. Anyone know what's going on here?

Have you opened it on a different computer? I have seen glitches like these before as a result of gfx card issues

[8bit]

I haven't, because I don't have another computer that can run Lightroom. I did go back in to Lightroom just now to try disabling GPU acceleration and noticed sometihng else - it only shows up in the Develop module, not the Library or other modules. I tried exporting from the Library module but the corruption still appears on the exported image.

I'll try updating the GPU drivers and see if that helps...

[8bit]

Unfortunately that doesn't seem to have helped

[GravelBen]

That's an odd one, it has never done anything like that to me.

Is Lightroom up to date? If no then you could try updating it, if yes then has this only happened since the last update?

[8bit]

Yes Lightroom is up to date.

I did manage to open the affected RAW files on another machine just using Windows' Photos app and they show black areas where the lurid colours appear in Lightroom, just as Photos on my main computer do. Faststone viewer on my own computer shows them fine - maybe it's using an embedded JPG preview in the RAW files?

Looks like the RAW files have somehow gotten corrupted, question is where. They looked fine on the display on my camera. When I noticed the first one had gone bad I copied it again from the second SD card, it was fine to start with (managed to edit and export it) so I doubt both cards are failing at once. I usually put the SD card in a USB3 card reader and use Nikon Transfer 2 to import to my NAS and edit from there, second time I didn't use Nikon Transfer 2 just copied via Windows Explorer so that rules the Nikon app out. Guess it could be the card reader or the NAS.

Lightroom won't be editing the RAW file at all I think (correct me if I'm wrong?) after it's imported so seems unlikely it was Lightroom wot dunnit. Unfortunately I cleared out my memory cards after re-importing the original problem file the second time or I'd have tried importing again by connecting the camera via USB cable to rule out the SD reader. Any other ideas more than welcome!

[Nimby]

8bit said:

I haven't, because I don't have another computer that can run Lightroom. I did go back in to Lightroom just now to try disabling GPU acceleration and noticed sometihng else - it only shows up in the Develop module, not the Library or other modules. I tried exporting from the Library module but the corruption still appears on the exported image.

I'll try updating the GPU drivers and see if that helps...

Doesn't Library used cached thumbnails rather than the raw image itself?

You're right in that Lightroom doesn't alter the source file at all.

[Mr Pointy]

Any chance that something like Recuva can get the files back off the cards?
https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva

[8bit]

Nimby said:

Doesn't Library used cached thumbnails rather than the raw image itself?

You're right in that Lightroom doesn't alter the source file at all.

That's what I thought as well (Lightroom using it's own previews generated from RAW data rather than internal JPG in the files) but if that was the case then if the image was corrupted in the SD card or by the card reader then surely the corruption would have shown up the first time Lightroom looked at it. That would then point to the NAS server but given two separate copies of the same file were shown as corrupt then I'm baffled again.

Mr Pointy said:

Any chance that something like Recuva can get the files back off the cards?
https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva

Thanks - I'll check that out.

[driver67]

Try downloading Nikon's own Raw Processor (NX Studio).

https://downloadcenter.nikonimglib.com/en/products...

Dougie.

[8bit]

driver67 said:

Try downloading Nikon's own Raw Processor (NX Studio).

https://downloadcenter.nikonimglib.com/en/products...

Dougie.

Thanks, will do - is that with a view to recovering the corrupted files somehow?

[trashbat]

Just here to say I think you've already identified it correctly - the embedded preview is OK, the main image is corrupted, hence why it appears OK under some circumstances but not once you start editing in earnest.

[driver67]

8bit said:

driver67 said:

Try downloading Nikon's own Raw Processor (NX Studio).

https://downloadcenter.nikonimglib.com/en/products...

Dougie.

Thanks, will do - is that with a view to recovering the corrupted files somehow?

It will at least identify if the issue is with Lightroom or your RAW file is indeed corrupt somehow.

NX Studio should open your RAW, if it does, save it as a TIFF then import that into Lightroom.

Dougie.

[8bit]

trashbat said:

Just here to say I think you've already identified it correctly - the embedded preview is OK, the main image is corrupted, hence why it appears OK under some circumstances but not once you start editing in earnest.

OK so then Lightroom does use the embedded preview? If that's the case then the corruption must be happening after import as I managed to re-import a second copy of the first corrupted file, edited it and exported it, then the corruption showed up again after next time I opened Lightroom. That would suggest it's gotten corrupted on the NAS, which I could understand once, but three times with two different RAW images?

[8bit]

driver67 said:

It will at least identify if the issue is with Lightroom or your RAW file is indeed corrupt somehow.

NX Studio should open your RAW, if it does, save it as a TIFF then import that into Lightroom.

Dougie.

Thanks - will try that.

[trashbat]

8bit said:

OK so then Lightroom does use the embedded preview? If that's the case then the corruption must be happening after import as I managed to re-import a second copy of the first corrupted file, edited it and exported it, then the corruption showed up again after next time I opened Lightroom. That would suggest it's gotten corrupted on the NAS, which I could understand once, but three times with two different RAW images?

I don't know but I imagine that Library might use it. The main renderer in Develop definitely won't.

[8bit]

Thanks trashbat.

I managed to recover one of the affected RAW files from cloud backup and it's fine, no corruption. So that rules out the camera, SD cards and the card reader as a minimum. The modified date on the file matches the date and time the image was shot so I guess that rules out Lightroom and the PC, as the file hasn't been edited since it was shot. That probably only leaves the NAS system or the hard drives as a possible cause.

[trashbat]

It's true that RAW files are immutable, but when you look at a conceptually modified RAW file in Lightroom then you're probably really looking at the RAW original plus a modification/transformation file in some form. The latter could be corrupted.

In other words it is possible, if perhaps unlikely, that the scratch disk or catalogue or whatever Lightroom uses is itself damaged. So you can't be immediately confident that it's not the PC or its software.

[8bit]

So yes, Lightroom doesn't edit the RAW file, the adjustments are made as an overlay so to speak, then rendered into the JPG or whatever when you export. But any file on disk can become corrupted if the disk has bad sectors or something.

The files also don't look right in other tools such as Camera Raw (which I don't believe integrates with Lightroom at least as far as editing is concerned) and also Windows Photos app, which has nothing to do with the Lightroom adjustments whatsoever.

[JatHanspal]

What brand and format cards are you using, and what card reader?

I had a similar issue when my lexar CF cards presented this when using the later USB 3.0 Lexar Professional card reader. My previous USB 2.0 version was fine.

After discussion with Lexar support, this was a known issue with the 3.0 version of the card reader and some older cards. Lexar replaced my cards and readers and the issue went away. The damaged images (RAW files) were not recoverable, but I managed to extract the JPEG previews that you can see when you review the images in camera etc.