Image looks completely different when it opens in Camera Raw

[lauriel15127903]

Can anyone help me understand why my image looks completely different in camera raw? I'm fine with how it's shot, then I open it, it opens in camera raw, and looks terrible!! All blown out and contrasty!! And that's the way it stays when I open it in Photoshop. What's going on? I'm attaching a sample... Camera Raw is on the Left, Bridge view (and how it looked on the back of my camera), is on the Right.

Shooting with a Nikon D700 and using the latest versions of PS and CR. Thanks!

[D Fosse]

Stephen is correct - this is reverse engineering to get as close to the camera manufacturer's version as possible. But since it's a completely different raw processing engine, it can never be entirely identical.

Actually, this is forcing the ACR engine to do something it doesn't really "want" to. A lot of sharp twists and turns are required in the camera profiles, and the entire processing pipeline, to produce this match.

And the final result usually doesn't look nearly as good as letting ACR use its native algorithms as they are intended. We see a lot of posts here with complaints about various camera-matching profiles. And they are usually correct! It doesn't look good - but not because they are doing a sloppy job at Adobe. It's because the task is very difficult, and in principle impossible.

I've never understood why the camera rendering should be holy. It's just an interpretation along with any other interpretation. I don't want Sony/Nikon/Canon or anyone else to decide how my images should look. I want to decide that myself. Isn't that the whole point of shooting raw?