Image different Bridge vs Photoshop

Hi Rrozema54,

Thank you for the screenshots. (BTW, I've never heard of Fastone Viewer, so thanks for not including images from that app, it wouldn't have helped me or made a difference.)

Here is a screenshot of what I'm seeing. Here's the PS view at 50%

And here is Bridge WHEN SHOWN AT FULL-SCREEN MODE. (I'll explain my emphasis in a moment)

And yes, that looks dreadful.

Just out of curiosity, what are the pixel dimensions of that image, and what are the pixel dimensions of your monitor?

Let me give you the short answer: I do not know

Let me give you the longer answer: my guess as to what's going on.

Bridge is a viewer/browser application. There are certain things it does VERY well, other things, not so much, and some stuff, not at all.

The reason why I ask is that when you go into Full-Screen mode (tapping the Space Bar), the image shown is the image taking the "fit" size or smaller, and anything smaller is at 100%. Adobe took the choice of not inventing pixels and not doing a lot of creative work in removing pixels. For the former of not inventing pixels, we see a number of complaints in the forums for people saying that they want to see full-sized images when pressing full size, and all they are seeing is a tiny image. Here's an example. The following screenshot was taken on my very first digital camera. The largest image it could take was 1360 x 1024 pixels. It was a great camera but it was one of the early digital cameras. When I tap the Full-Screen mode, this is what it looks like on my Apple 5k Studio Monitor:

My screen is 5120 x 2880 pixels. Adobe has chosen not to expand that image to fill my screen because it would be rediculously blurred. However, when I zoom into that in PS, it looks "OK" because PS takes the time to do the calculations to get a better view. 

Bridge does not have those capabilities to do those calculataions. 

I'm guess you have the reverse issue. Your image is larger than your screen's dimensions and is doing some fudging when it trying to shrink your image to fit your screen. What I'm seeing I belive to be that fudging. 

Otherwise, what I'm seeing is that the colors look look, the dynamic range is good, overall, the image looks fine. It's when you look at the soft subtle details that the image breaks down and looks very bad. If anything, I think this is a sharpening artifact. I'm saying that because it looks like the detail on the bird's crown is much sharper in the Full-Screen view than the 50% view in PS.

One thing I'd like for you to try (and please put the result in this thread): Whatever your screen's vertical height is, please set the Image size of this bird in PS to be (say) 10 pixels less. So if your screen is 3680 x 1840 (and I'm completely making that up since I do not know your screen's size), set the vertical height to be 1830 pixels. Save as PS or TIF so we get no image degradation, and in Bridge, press the Space Bar and let's see if that area under the bird is as bad as it looks when the image is larger than your screen size.

In short, I'm not sure what your seeing can be fixed, but I hope we can explain it.

Thanks