RAW images suddenly appearing red in Bridge & Photoshop

Question

I've been using Bridge/Photoshop to edit RAW images on a MacBook Pro for years without issue.

Beginning yesterday, every image I attempt to open in Bridge and/or Photoshop appears to have a heavy red tint. Images I've previously opened & edited in the days leading up to this (which all looked fine), are now also appearing with the red tint.

Any idea what I can do to solve this issue?

D Fosse · Accepted Answer

There's a smoking gun here: the histograms aren't identical. So somewhere there's a preset, camera profile or slider setting that is different. But I can't make out anything from those screenshots because you've scaled them down. EDIT: hang on. There's a camera profile in the red one "Artistic 01". I can't make out the other one, but it looks like the standard profile "Adobe Color". That's what it is.

D Fosse · Answer

There is no such thing as an un-processed, "original" file from a camera. The sensor raw data have to be processed in some way to produce a viewable "normal" image. Every raw processor will have its own algorithms and produce different results from the same sensor data.They will all look different.

That's normal. You just have a very unusual case here, where two different processing engines produce very different results. All the variables and factors came together here, it seems.

What you see on the camera screen is the camera-processed jpeg, processed according to fixed algorithms in the camera firmware. This is also what Mac Preview displays. Preview is not a raw processor; it just fetches the embedded jpeg.

Here's the thing: While the camera processing aims for a "pleasing" result - that's what sells cameras - the ACR defaults are intentionally conservative. The primary aim is to conserve as much information as possible. The rest is up to you! You're really not supposed to just accept the default settings in ACR. The sliders are there for a reason - use them!

And then there's the camera profiles in ACR, which are intended to give you a range of different starting points. Among these should be profiles that closely match the camera rendering. Try those. This is Lightroom, but ACR is the same:

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded