Sony RX100: quality of RAW conversions in LR 4.2 RC

Question

Hi,
I've just purchased a Sony RX100 as a replacement for an aging Canon S90. Before that I've tried the fantastic Olympus OM-D (but returned it because of a - for me - serious issue with the Sony-sourced sensor, see here http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1008&message=42126356 and because the support for camera calibration profiles in LR was non-existing). I'm happy to concede that I'm spoiled by the fantastic support LR provides for my D700 and even, S90 RAW images...
So with that background I've approached the RX100 images with a healty portion of scepticism. What I've found surprised me:
1) the standard Adobe Standard camera calibration setting gave the best results, the other profiles gave strange (magenta) color casts, especially with direct sun light.
2) I've found that images taken in parallel with my old S90 to give much nicer colors (though of course with a lot less resolution and more noise) - but again the colors looked much nicer, especially skies, greenery etc. I've also noted (and this was also present with the OM-D images) that the Sony image conversions has a touch too much red tint, which I had to correct manually (this doesn't happen with D700 and S90 images).
So, I'd like to post my first impressions here for comments ;-)
Did anybody else have similar results? Maybe I did something wrong?

Answer 1

Is the DNG opened in PS as a normal picture (not in the ACR dialoge!) with the title "xyz.DNG"? If that is the case, it is actually correct. When LR detects a compatible ACR (which happened after you installed ACR 6.7), it will pass the raw/DNG directly to PS without rendering a TIFF on its own. The file name indicated by photoshop is the original raw/DNG file then.
When you save the picture in photoshop, it will create the actual image file using the file type and other options (color space, bit depth...) you configured in Lightroom. So the outcome of the whole "edit in..." action is exactly what you want, with Photoshop creating the image file at the time you save it.
P.S. What happened before updating to ACR 6.7 was that probably sometimes before, the ACR compatibility warning dialog appeared and you chose "render using lightroom", causing LR to produce the TIFF file on its own and Photoshop to load that TIFF file, and consequently also displaying "xyz.TIFF". Now that LR considers ACR 6.7 as compatible, that behaviour is replaced with the new behaviour as described above - and the warning dialog no longer appears.