CS3 Bridge & ACR 4.1 Soft Preview??

jdryan3

OK, I shot a bunch of pix at my son's soccer game the other day - nice and sunny. And when I got back and looked at them on my Mac Book Pro with Bridge, they looked sorta soft/slightly out of focus. Even using the loupe.

Images were made using a 5D w/ 70-200 f/2.8 (IS off) since I was shooting about 1/1600, or f/4 at 1/640. I saw what looked like only a few keepers. I was concerned my lens had focusing issues.

Then I verified that I was using AI Servo, I use CF4 (* button for AF), center focus, batteries were freshly recharged, lens clean. I even read the sports shooting tips sticky on the Sports Forum.

So today I opened up one of the few keepers in ACR 4.1 and...it was dead on perfect. I even turned off the sharpening in ACR (preview only), and the difference wasn't that great. I tweaked, cropped and closed it. But in Bridge, still soft. I opened a bunch more in ACR 4.1 and they also were as sharp as I would expect.

I've shot a lot of sports in the past, but I was using CS2 Bridge & ACR 3.x on a PC to process them. And I just don't remember the difference between the 2 apps being that significant. I don't think it is the Mac, but....

Has anyone else seen this? Did I miss a 'new' (or old) setting?

Here are samples of the pix converted to jpeg in ACR.
#1


#2


#3


Any ideas? :dunno

jfriend

I have seen Bridge get into a mode where it won't generate sharp preview images for some images in a directory, even when the original RAW image is perfectly sharp. It's clearly some sort of bug with Bridge previews.

For me, I've only seen it happen in a directory with a lot of files (>500 RAW files). Here are some things you can try:

• Shut-down and restart Bridge.
• Make sure you aren't low on disk space
• Purge your preview cache.
• Purge the cached previews for this directory and wait for Bridge to regenerate new previews.
• In Windows Explorer (not in Bridge), copy 10 images with the problem to a new directory, then point Bridge at the new directory and see if Bridge can handle these images when they are in a directory with only a few files in it.

jdryan3

jfriend wrote:

I have seen Bridge get into a mode where it won't generate sharp preview images for some images in a directory, even when the original RAW image is perfectly sharp. It's clearly some sort of bug with Bridge previews.

For me, I've only seen it happen in a directory with a lot of files (>500 RAW files). Here are some things you can try:

• Shut-down and restart Bridge.
• Make sure you aren't low on disk space
• Purge your preview cache.
• Purge the cached previews for this directory and wait for Bridge to regenerate new previews.
• In Windows Explorer (not in Bridge), copy 10 images with the problem to a new directory, then point Bridge at the new directory and see if Bridge can handle these images when they are in a directory with only a few files in it.

Great tips. The most interesting thing is the >500 images part. I used to copy my Raw from the CF to a directory. When I had a 300D, every 100 images had their own folder. 5D puts them all in the same, so I just copy them to my 'Current' (working) folder.

Before I moved to the Mac from a PC, I would keyword and rank my images, then move them to a folder based upon their rank/status. When I moved to the Mac and got Lightroom also, I decided to let the software do its job and keep all the images in one folder. Then I would use only keywords, labels, & rankings as filters. So I gotta have 3000+ RAW images in my main folder. Doesn't seem like a lot, really.

I'll purge the cache and try a a small sample folder of images to test your suggestions.