Hi everyone,

I hope this post isn't a waste of everyone's time, but I've come across an image corruption problem that seems to be a bit different to your usual "it's obviously the hard disk failing" type of thing.

My setup: G5 quad, OS 10.4.8, 4.5GB RAM, two internal hard drives, Photoshop CS2 9.0.2, Camera RAW 3.6 (and previous versions...). All images are stored on the internal hard drives and no networking is involved.

Processing images from: Canon EOS 1D MkII, 30D, 20D, 350D

I've been using this setup since December 2005, but I've been seeing occasional corrupted images in Bridge and Photoshop since July this year. These may appear:

* in Bridge while viewing RAW thumbnails. The preview will also be corrupt in these cases. However, sometimes the corruption will disappear when opening the image in ACR and clicking the "done" button will reset the corrupted preview. In this case, the corruption will tend to be fairly extreme with large parts of the image only displaying one or two channels.

* in ACR after opening what looked like a healthy image from Bridge. In this case, clicking "done" creates a new, corrupted preview in Bridge. Checking the raw file in Preview or Lightroom shows that it is not in fact corrupt. Re-opening the image in ACR immediately still shows a corrupted image, but sometimes coming back to it several days later (n.b. without relaunching PS or Bridge in the meantime) will clear the corruption. Again, in this case, the corruption will tend to be fairly extreme with large parts of the image only displaying one or two channels.

* after saving the image as TIFF from either ACR or Photoshop. In this case, the corruption will normally take the form of a coloured stripe a few dozen pixels wide across the image. Going back to the RAW file shows no corruption, and re-saving a new conversion of the image will always work properly.

* the fact that I'm processing RAW files may be a red herring because I've been getting occasional corrupted TIFFs when I've just been working from a saved TIFF.

My first thought was "hardware problem", although I should point out that I haven't had any of the other symptoms you might expect from a bad hard disk or RAM - other apps seem to be perfectly happy and I don't suffer from any unexplained crashes or corruption problems in other documents. Both my RAM and hard drives check out okay using Apple's hardware diagnostics utility.

I've also tried removing all trace of Adobe apps from my system before reinstalling Photoshop and Bridge. Unfortunately, the first folder of RAW files I've looked at in Bridge is showing several corrupted previews out of the 3534 images it contains.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what else I should be trying in order to resolve this problem?

With thanks in advance,
Tom

Tom_Catchesides

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Unusual PS CS2 image corruption problem