How do you start Camera Raw?

[Tannin]

Sometimes, you want to open a JPG in Adobe Camera Raw. (I have Photoshop CS3.)

Camera Raw is perfectly capable of operating on JPG files, and although you obviously don't get the same flexibility of adjustment you get with raw files, you can still do quite a bit with them.

For reasons quite incomprehensible to me, Adobe do weird and secretive stuff with Camera Raw. The normal way to open a JPG is to first open Adobe Bridge (this is a program that comes with Photoshop; it is essentially the slowest, most RAM-hungry file-browser on the planet and not much else), navigate to the folder where the JPG is, then right-click on it and select "open with Camera Raw".

This is tedious and annoying.

Worse, I've just discovered that it doesn't always work! I just went to open a JPG in Camera Raw, went through the usual starting up Bridge nonsense, only to discover that on this particular JPG there is no "open with Camera Raw" option! I double and triple checked, but there is nothing there. I even copied the JPG into TIFF format, with the same result. Yet the exact same procedure on other essentialy identical, straight-from-the-camera JPGs stored in the exact same folder does work! (And people wonder why I despise Adobe products.)

I've searched the web looking for the name of the Camera Raw executable so that I can just create a shortcut to it in the normal way, but without success. Can anyone help?

[Kym]

I use Lightroom first and only goto PS when I need too. LR does the raw processing.

[ricktas]

This is off the top of my head..not on a pc with PS installed at present

The ACR file is called : Camera Raw.8bi (from memory)

It is a plug-in for PS, so not sure if you can run it as a stand alone

Edit, its default location on a PC is something like this: Program files/common files/adobe/plugins/(photoshop version)/file formats (again off the top of my head here, so might be slightly wrong)

[Tannin]

Lightroom is no help to me unfortunately, Kym, I don't have it.

Thanks Rick. Hmmm .... there is a conundrum then. If it's a Photoshop plug-in and (as we have seen) you can't reliably start it from within Photoshop .... looks as though I'm stuck. Grrrr..... Honestly, Adobe producs are, on balance, more frustrating than Microsoft ones - at least you don't expect Microsoft stuff to be any good most of the time, so you geta nice surprise when it works well. Maybe I should adjust my expectations, but at ~$1000 a copy, I do expect better than this. Sigh.

Bibble works OK with JPGs, but it can't open TIFFs at all; Bibble 4.x is weird and buggy despite some nice features, and Bibble 5 (which I have already paid for) has been on waiting, waiting, waiting status for an eternity now, with (it is safe to presume) a zillion bugz still to fix.

Anyone want to sell me a film camera?

[Cathi]

I use Camera Raw in PSE6, and the only way I have found of opening it, is opening PSE6, going to File and Open As.. it brings up the little window and it has a drop down list at the bottom of what file format you want to open it in, and Camera Raw is about the third option down.... I hope that helps? It may not even be what you are looking for LOL

[Tannin]

I use Camera Raw in PSE6, and the only way I have found of opening it, is opening PSE6, going to File and Open As.. it brings up the little window and it has a drop down list at the bottom of what file format you want to open it in, and Camera Raw is about the third option down....

Ahh, but this is exactly the problem, Cathi!

I just went to open a JPG in Camera Raw, doing it the same way I usually do it (which is exactly what you describe) .... but there is no "open with Camera Raw" on this particular JPG, and even if I convert it to TIFF, there still isn't one! Why? Just another Photoshop bug, I guess. There is nothing weird about the JPG file, it's just an out-of-camera JPG from a 20D, the same as all my other JPGs.

[Tannin]

I dunno if this is of any use to you Tony.

In CS3 prefs you can set PS to open JPEGs with ACR. I then use an external image viewer called XnView, which is the fastest I've come across. I can right click on any image and open it in CS3...and since we've told CS3 to open JPEGs in ACR, that's exactly how they open. No need to use that bloody awful Bridge that way.

Oh, I've also got PS set as a keyboard shortcut in XnView so it's actually quicker to use that rather than right clicking an image. Yes, you still need PS open, but it's gotta be a quicker and much better way than using Bridge. It has all the functions of bridge anyway too I think.

Thanks Rich!

I tried doing what you said with the CS3 prefs, and that works just fine. Except, of course, that now it opens every JPG with Camera Raw, when mostly I want to go straight to CS3. That's OK, I can just put it back the way it was for now, and next time Camera Raw refuses to open a JPG, I can just switch it back again for a while.

XnView is a very interesting little program! Thanks for the link. It's very similar to my in-constant-use viewer, PMView. XnView is a lot slower than PMView to load an image and to use the program itself (menus and so on) but is blindingly quick to load thumbnails. I have never seen a program load thumbnails faster than PMView before, but XnView is easily faster. Very impressive indeed! I'll have to spend some time playing with it. Not sure where it will fit into my workflow, but I'll be surprised if there isn't a use for it.