Why do my photos "change" when i first open them in ACR

Hi guys,

I've been wondering about this for a while. When i take a photo, see it in the camera, and first pull up the thumbnails in Adobe Bridge they look a certain way. As soon as you click on the the thumbnail so that it loads the preview, it CHANGES, they get significantly darker and more saturated, and this is how they open up in ACR.

This is particularly bad for my UW pics as blue water goes from a nice light blue hue to this dark oversaturated muck that i have to make major adjustments to change.

I often find myself, with blue water pics which are the worst affected, taking the saturation down to like -20 or -30 and the exposure up before it starts to look normal like it did in the camera/thumbnail. This is after i've already taken the in-camera saturation right down.

What's going on here and why do they always change for the worse once adobe begins to process them, even in the preview? Does anyone else have the same sort of problem. I do have a copy of CaptureNX which i never loaded on my new computer as is was horribly slow and painful to use, but will this process my raw files better??

I shoot in AdobeRGB. I'd really appreciate any advice. Cheers,

Chris

Hey Chris -

The first image you'll see is usually the embedded low-res thumb in the RAW file. It can look different for a given scene based on the in-camera settings you've selected (for example, if you push saturation and contrast in camera, the embedded low-res will be more saturated and contrasty, even though the RAW remains unaffected).

The change is ACR applying its rendering intent to the RAW file (with whatever additional adjustment or calibration settings you've applied by default) and displaying its revised image thumb (and ignoring the embedded thumb), which is often terrible . CaptureNX should initially display your RAW files as they are on the camera - at least that's how Canon's DPP has worked.

do you have the auto settings turned off in ACR? ie: the little check boxes. For some reason mine reload onto auto every now and again for some reason.