My .cr2 files turn a tinted blue after saving as jpegs in ACR CS5

Question

After color correcting a batch of about 100 images, I saved as jpegs and then hit done and a select few of the photos turn a tinted blue. All of the other settings stayed the same.. Does anyone have a clue as to what is going on? Or need me to explain more?

Answer 1

It sounds like user-error where an image off screen is still accidentally selected when tint is being adjusted on another group of images, perhaps with a mixture of fluorescent and daylight images, which have a significant difference in tint so the adjustment of one would be obvious on the other.
Since you posted here, I’d guess you don’t feel it is user-error and the ACR plug-in is doing something to cause the issue.  Because it is across two different versions of Photoshop and occurring with different people, a bug would have to be longstanding, but I don’t recall others reporting it.  Sometimes there are sliders that stick or become activated when an unrelated context is exited from (maybe I’m remembering things in Lightroom not ACR, though) so when the mouse-wheel is moved a slider unexpectedly moves instead of the thumbnail list scrolling, but that sort of thing should be obvious on-screen and not only when the JPGs are written.
Does the WB adjustment ever happen near the end of the process so it is the last thing done and a last-minute error might go unnoticed if ACR had not had a chance to redo all the thumbnails?
Is this a relatively new crew of people or a very light or very heavy load, where lack-of-attention or pressure could be leading to selection errors when and adjustment is applied and extra photos are getting selected by accident?  Is there anything different about the one person who hasn’t seen the problem?
Is there anything with the computer monitors that make it difficult to see what images are selected?
It might be interesting to look at the timestamp of the XMP files (if you use those) to see if the one with a bad WB was updated at a different time compared to the ones surrounding it that all were probably done at the same time. 
Are these files all local to each computer or are they being shared from a central location?
With a bug it would be nice to have a documented procedure that will always lead to the problem.  Something intermittent that cannot be reproduced by Adobe isn’t going to get fixed. 
If it happens relatively often, then you could record an entire session using a screen recorder (like camtasia or similar), or using a video camera over someone’s shoulder, and then play it back and look for either user-error, or as proof that there was none, but strange things happened.