Why does camera raw change my image?

Question

I have had this issue a while now and can't figure out how to change this. When I upload my images from the camera they are exactly how I wnat them in Bridge. Then when I zoom in on the image or open in ACR the image seems blown out and orange or has magenta tones in it. Because the image changes so much Iend up spending lots of time fixing in ACR rather than inhancing in ACR. Can someone please help me. I am using PS CS4, Windows7 and I shoot in RAW.

Answer 1

First, I only have CS5 so I may have given some preferences to look at that you don’t have or are available via a different set of clicks in CS4; however, from your responses, the situation seems relatively clear: the image in Bridge is the camera-rendered JPG thumbnail/preview while the image in ACR is the Adobe-rendering and is all you’ll ever be able to produce.
There are two issues:
1)      Bridge is not showing you the Adobe Rendering for some reason.  Perhaps Bridge CS4 still has a setting of whether to show high-quality thumbnails/previews or not and if you set this, then you’ll see the Adobe-rendering in Bridge as well.
2)      You expect the Adobe-rendering to be the same as the camera-rendering, which it can never be.  This is the main issue, although if item 1 was working, you wouldn't be distracted by the in-camera rendering.
How to produce the camera-rendering is known only to the manufacturer of the camera and anyone who has licensed their technology.  Adobe is a separate corporate entity with no access to the camera-manufacturer’s intellectual property governing how they produce their JPGs,  so Adobe has no way to produce the camera-rendering, nor do they want to.  Adobe wants to produce similar output from different cameras.  Presumably you are using the Adobe Standard camera profile.  If your camera is a Canon or Nikon or one of a few others, then besides Adobe’s standard camera-profile there are others that you can choose from where Adobe has attempted to approximate the in-camera rendering via a profile, although this may or may not be that close, it will be closer than using Adobe Standard as your profile.  You can find the camera profiles in ACR using the tab that looks like a black camera, 3rd from the right.  If you find a different camera profile more to your liking, then you can set that as your ACR default so newly processed images will have that new profile.  Besides chaning the profile, you can also dial back the saturation or vibrance and save that as your new ACR defaults.
I should warn you that the images in your screen-shot from Bridge have a slight greenish tinge and is quite pale-looking to my eyes, and the ACR view looks more natural.  It may be that your monitor, being uncalibrated, is distorting the colors and so your processing produces colors that everyone else will see as odd if they are viewed on different computers.  If you only ever use your processing to create prints and those prints look ok,  then perhaps this is not a problem, but if you produce web galleries for outsiders to view on their own computers, then it could be a problem.  It also could be that you and I are seeing the same thing and just differ in our preference for natural skintones.  If I had to guess, I'd say the screen-capture you have opened in Photoshop was done with an sRGB profile assigned as your monitor profile, but your color-settings in Photoshop assigned an Adobe RGB profile without doing the profile conversion and so the screen-capture as displayed in Photoshop does not actually look like the original screen in Bridge.