What is the relation between Camera Raw Bridge and Photoshop

[joelh33703351]

I am on a PC using Photoshop 23.3.2 and have recently discovered Camera Raw, which would appear to be the answer to my many needs. However, I can't find anything to help orient me. So I have a number of questions. 

Under my Adobe Creative Cloud Photoshop appears as does Lightroom and Lightroom Classic. They can be opened. Camera Raw appears  ( I think I recently had the option of updating it) but it does not have an "open" but. 

1)Does that mean I need to open it as a Camera Raw filter while in Photoshop? 

2) A number of other users have indicated opening Camera Raw through Bridge. What is that? Do I need it? 

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). 

4) Where are the Adobe Camera Raw tutorials? I don't see a Help button on the top menu?

The other concerns I have are more ongoing, like why is it so difficult to find information such as how to post to the community when you enter that in search. But that grousing is far less important that figuring out the connective tissue between these three apps. 

[TheDigitalDog]

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

[Conrad_C]

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.

[Conrad_C]

---

@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). 

---

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.

[joelh33703351]

Conrad, thank you for your generous response. I've also been given some links for tutorials as I am wondering if I can use Camera Raw or Bridge to Focus stack, which I use frequently. If not, I presume I would take my photo from lightroom open it to edit in Photoshop  and then auto-align, auto-blend, then continue to work on the image using the Camera Raw filter?

[Conrad_C]

Camera Raw and Bridge (and Lightroom) don’t have any focus stacking features right now. Currently, Camera Raw and Lightroom can merge multiple images into a panorama or an HDR image, but not into an extended depth of field focus stack.

As far as I know, the only focus stacking available in an Adobe Creative Cloud application is in Photoshop, using the Edit > Auto-Blend Layers command you mentioned.