Grain in photoshop but not ACR

[KK2016]

Hi there, I'm wondering how come in my ACR my image looks perfect but when I "open" the image into CS6 it's ridiculously grain-y even after doing "noise reduction" in ACR . I never had this problem in older versions of Photoshop.

[Damien Symonds]

First things first, please don't halve your hard drive space and computer power by working in 16-bit.  It's completely unnecessary.

Secondly, please show me a 100% crop of the grain in Photoshop.

Thirdly, fill this out for me.

[KK2016]

Thanks for the tip- changing now.

 

 

I have a PC desktop running Windows 10 and Photoshop CS6. It is over 2 years old, and has 4GB of RAM. Its hard drive has 398GB free out of 2000GB. The last time I shut down was earlier today. I rarely run a cleanup program.

[Damien Symonds]

Thanks.  Now could you zoom in to 100% on the file in ACR, and take a screenshot to show me how it differs there?

16 minutes ago, KK2016 said:

I have a PC desktop running Windows 10 and Photoshop CS6. It is over 2 years old, and has 4GB of RAM

This is only half of the recommended minimum RAM for CS6.  You're likely to have problems.

[KK2016]

Two great points- I didn't even consider the RAM space needed for CS6 (thank you!) and now that I'm zooming up into ACR I'm thinking wow I guess not much difference?

[Damien Symonds]

We need to be very clear about this ...

6 minutes ago, KK2016 said:

not much difference?

... or no difference at all?

It's most likely that they're identical between ACR and PS when both are viewed at 100%.  But I need you to confirm that before we move on to the next part of the discussion.

[KK2016]

Zoomed out, there is a major difference- everything looks so nice and smooth in ACR. But yes, at 100% I agree the image in ACR and PS look identical

[Damien Symonds]

Good.  So there is no actual problem with the file, apart from the fact that you have neglected the noise removal.  Please never neglect that, ever.

Please do it now, then tell me if the "problem" still exists when you open the file into Photoshop.

[KK2016]

Actually I do use noise removal (in ACR) religiously but with this set of images something was really wrong. I did notice that my "sharpening" was turned way up. That made a difference obviously in the overexaggerated grain in PS.  It's definitely better now that I turned the sharpening down and noise removal up. There is still grain in the PS image though, but I did shoot at 2500 ISO. It looks a lot better though.

[Damien Symonds]

Next, this.