Yes - you are right - and it’s not “pedantic” - it’s an important finding. I missed that because I had always started from “1st principles”, not a previously worked photo. What it means, then, is that in these cases of previously “NLP-ed” photos, “reset” does not actually reset the photo to its base start-of-life conditions in this one important respect. I think Nate should change this behaviour in a future update. It can make a huge difference to results, as we’ve seen.
Until then, if one runs into this kind of situation, where one wants a true, complete reset, perhaps the best approach is to revert to the raw image file on the hard drive, without the XMP, copy it to another folder, rename it and work it from scratch. I’ve tried this and it appears to solve the problem.
I’ve created a post under the “Troubleshooting and Bugs” category [Reset Photo(s) only Unconverts Photo(s)] outlining this unexpected behaviour. Not sure how often Nate reviews those posts prior to pushing out updates, but figured that could be my small contribution to the improvement of NLP.
I will keep your suggestions in mind if a complete reset of the raw image is needed. Lightroom’s “Reset” button does return the Profile back to the default Adobe Color, but the NLP settings still persist on re-converting the negative, requiring a “reset” in the EDIT tab - or, as you suggest, creating a duplicate file. Hopefully that will be an uncommon occurrence!
