Camera Raw glitch?

hi everyone,  not sure if this is the right place to post

By @Bewitched_character5DEE

Well, technically, a question about Camera Raw should be posted in the Camera Raw community, but here are some suggestions anyway. Maybe a moderator will move this thread.

Visual glitches like this are often traced to issues with specific versions of Mac or PC graphics hardware, so one thing that can help troubleshoot is to look at the GPU settings for Camera Raw. When you’re working in Bridge, you can choose the command Camera Raw Preferences menu as shown in the picture below. When that opens, look in the Performance panel. In there, tell us these two things: 

• The state of the Use Graphics Processor menu (the top item in the red box in the picture). 
• What kind of graphics hardware that Mac has (the area highlighted in blue in the picture). 

The funny thing about this is, my Camera Raw looks perfectly normal when editing, so I thought nothing was wrong on my Mac. But when I opened Camera Raw Preferences, I saw the same type of glitch that you see in the picture below!

Because certain fields are inverted, I started wondering if it was related to the light/dark setting for the user interface. There is a setting in macOS for this, and Camera Raw has its own setting for this too. One reason Camera Raw has its own setting is that it’s one of the Adobe applications that (for some reason) is still unable to automatically follow the OS light/dark setting like other Mac apps do. Based on that, I played around with the macOS Appearance setting for Light or Dark, and found that it seems to interact with the Color Theme setting in Camera Raw preferences, General panel. I also found that it sort of cleared up if I toggled the Light/Dark UI setting in macOS.

So maybe there is some odd interaction between the Adobe and Apple light/dark UI modes. Until Adobe or Apple fixes whatever the real problem is, you might try toggling Light/Dark UI in macOS a few times. You can do that in macOS System Setting / Appearance, but it’s usually a lot easier to do it in the Control Center from the menu bar.

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@Bewitched_character5DEE wrote:

(Also I know lt would be easier to just use Lightroom but I'm in university and we are required to use Camera Raw)

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There’s nothing wrong with using Camera Raw. I personally prefer Lightroom Classic, but there are times when Camera Raw is a better tool. The fact that Camera Raw is a plug-in makes it somewhat more versatile than Lightroom, because as a plug-in Camera Raw can provide raw editing services from inside multiple applications you might be using (Photoshop, Bridge, After Effects…).

What have you tried?  

Is this the latest version of Photoshop?  If not, then definitely update because there have historically been issues like this that were fixed with updates.

For now, I'd be restarting your computer, and Photoshop for a start, and if that does not fix it, reset Preferences.