Bridge view vs Photoshop view

[paula8080]

Hi. I actually have two questions. The first: why do my images look good (and they match what comes back from the lab) in Photoshop but look completely different if I open them in Bridge? Second is--if I take a TIF file and open it in Camera Raw format and tweak it in the exact same manner in Elements vs CS5, when I view the images side by side (in the same program), they look completely different? Thanks.

 

[KmH]

Hi. I actually have two questions. The first: why do my images look good (and they match what comes back from the lab) in Photoshop but look completely different if I open them in Bridge?

Bridge is just an image file browser. It is designed to work with most of the other applications is Adobe's Creative Suite, not just Photoshop. Photoshop is a raster graphics application while most of the other Creative Suite applications are vector graphics.

Second is--if I take a TIF file and open it in Camera Raw format and tweak it in the exact same manner in Elements vs CS5, when I view the images side by side (in the same program), they look completely different? Thanks.

Which version of Ps Elements? Camera Raw isn't a format, it's a Raw converter.
All versions of Ps Elements uses a truncated (de-featured) version ACR, and the rendering and demosaicing algorithms are also truncated, which is likely why they look different.

All Raw converters use somewhat different algoritms. If you have a Nikon camera and open your Raw files in Capture NX, Camera Raw CS5, and Camera Raw Elements 9, all 3 would look different. If you used 5 different Raw Converters you would see 5 different versions of the same Raw image file.

Ps Elements 9 uses the consumer version of ACR 6.x, while older versions of Ps Elements use older, but still truncated versions of ACR. CS5 and Lightroom 3 use the same full version of ACR 6.x