Vista64 & CS3 - pictures are way too dark

I am trying to help a very nice older lady (she's 75 and going very strong). She just bought a new Vista 64 PC and is using CS3 on it to edit her pics. When she views the pictures in Bridge they look correctly exposed, as soon as she opens them in either ACR or PS they are way too dark. Her system is NOT calibrated (yet). Other applications, like the MS viewer, also display the pics as being too dark. Her histograms look OK - the pics certainly are not under exposed.

Does someone have an idea where she needs to change her settings? I am really at a loss - I tried everything I could think of (granted, that might not be a lot

Thanks for any help!

Nobody has any idea either?

Anything you do prior to calibration is really just wasting time. Very few windows applications are actually color managed. Photoshop is, Firefox is (if you turn it on). I don't know for sure if Bridge is or isn't.

5D,

Lend her your calibrator, or borrow one from a friend yourself and do it for her. The simple answer is that the screen is far too bright, but to get it right she (or you) needs to have something measuring the luminance accurately.

If the screen were too bright, the images wouldn't display too dark I'd say...

So. Bridge is the only one displaying okay?

Are these Raw files or jpg?
What settings in ACR?

Post an image and / or screenshot maybe.

Rene,

Oop's, sorry. I misread the original post and jumped to the wrong conclusion.

Note to self: Make sure you understand the question before putting your foot into you mouth next time.

It happens with both JPEg and RAW and yes, according to her, only Bridge displays the pictures correctly. I will meet her on Saturday to see what I can do to get this resolved - it sure sounds weird. It is like somewhere an icc profile is applied in color managed applications, but I know for sure that she did not calibrate her monitor yet - she just got this new PC and all she did was load CS3 onto it. I was just wondering if there is anything in Vista64 that I am not aware of that could cause this problem (I am still on XP - lucky me

First guess would be a corrupt monitor profile, but that wouldn't explain MS Viewer (unless that's also color managed; no idea really).

Try setting sRGB for monitor profile (temporarily!).
If that fixes the difference, the monitor profile is likely to be the problem.

Thank you all for your suggestions. I will let you know how it went and if the problem is resolved.