What is the relation between Camera Raw Bridge and Photoshop

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@joelh33703351 wrote:

3) Once I am able to open Camera Raw and grab a raw file from Photoshop by opening as and then changing the format to Camera Raw once I make a change, is clicking "Done" the same as saving the file? And is the file to be saved in a particular format (I will want to make more changes). 

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There is a difference between clicking Done and clicking Open.

If you click Open, Camera Raw converts a raw file to color channels (e,g, RGB, CMYK) as it passes the document to Photoshop. At that point it is an unsaved Photoshop document, so you must save it. If you want to preserve all Photoshop features (layers, editable type, etc.) you must now save it in Photoshop or layered TIFF format.

If you click Done, Camera Raw closes and saves the changes without passing the file to another application. But raw files are designed to be read-only, so the saved changes must either go into a separate .XMP metadata file that’s created using the same filename as the image (a “sidecar” file), or into the file header if it’s a DNG/JPEG/TIFF file.

It might help to know the history.

Originally Photoshop was all anyone needed. It opened all kinds of images. But when pro digital cameras appeared, many wanted to edit directly from the raw camera sensor data, not a JPEG or TIFF saved from the camera. The code needed to edit camera raw files was not in Photoshop, so Adobe created the Camera Raw plug-in. Originally, the Camera Raw plug-in only worked with Photoshop, and only available as you opened camera raw data. In other words, only through the File > Open command.

As users realized how much quality they could preserve by working at the camera raw level, they wanted to be able to do it with applications other than Photoshop. Adobe enabled the use of Camera Raw with more applications, such as the Adobe Bridge media organizer and the Adobe After Effects motion graphics application. So Camera Raw is installed and updated as a single plug-in on your computer, but various applications can load it.

Camera Raw can be particularly useful in Adobe Bridge, because in Bridge you can select multiple raw images and load them all into Camera Raw for bulk processing and export, without having to open Photoshop.

Some of the most useful Camera Raw features have no equivalent in the Photoshop application itself, but people wanted to use those features on non-raw images. Instead of adding those features to Photoshop, Adobe chose to let Camera Raw be used as a filter. Now when a layer is selected in a Photoshop document, you can choose Filter > Camera Raw Filter. When used as a filter, some features are not available because you’re applying it to a non-raw layer, not an entire raw file.

The other thing they did was expand the format support so that, if enabled in Camera Raw preferences, you can also edit TIFF and JPEG files in Camera Raw.

The Camera Raw engine is the basis for the Lightroom develop module. This is why the edit controls in Camera Raw and Lightroom are practically identical. However, Lightroom does not load the Camera Raw plug-in; instead Lightroom embeds an internal copy of the Camera Raw code and it’s updated in sync with the Camera Raw plug-in.

Camera Raw is a plug in. It can be used to process raw files as a plug-in or it can be used on rendered (not raw data) as a filter. When working with raws, it saves instructions for processing the raw as a rendered image (TIFF, JPEG etc) and the Open command makes this happen, while done just saves the instructions for another time. 

Adobe has all kinds of tutorials and info, start here: 

https://jkost.com/blog/category/adobe-camera-raw-and-dng