Previews blurry in Bridge CS5...

When I go to review mode in Bridge (Command B), the images come up full screen but they are a bit blurry. Sometimes I think a shot is out of foucs, but when I open it in ACR or PS, its tack sharp. This defeats the purpose of me culling my images in Review Mode since I cannot tell if the shot is actually in focus or not. Is there a setting I can change so it won't do this?
Mac Snow Leopard, 27" monitor, full resoution.

Is it initially unsharp, or does it stay that way?
What happens if you click it? (to go to 100% view)

IMO, you should judge sharpness at 100% view. (Or maybe 50% or 25%)
Not "fit to screen".

PSCS4 (with supported videocard) is way better then previous versions at "weird" zoom rates, but still gets funky occasionally...

When you first double click on an image in Bridge, it will open ACR and notice the yellow triangle in the top right corner. Until it goes away, the image will be very soft. Once it goes away, it should look good at any magnification. How long it takes depends on your computer. On mine it takes about a second.

Bridge generates monitor size previews and 100% previews for images. If you don't have it set up to store these in the cache, then it has to regenerate them on demand (which can be slow).

To test to see if this is your issue, go into review mode and find a picture that is blurry and wait a few minutes to see if it sharpens up.

You can keep monitor size previews in cache by going into preferences->advanced and checking 'Generate Monitor-Size Previews'. You can keep 100% previews in the cache by going into preferences->cache and checking 'Keep 100% previews in cache'.

Keep in mind that you might have this stuff already checked and you're just experiencing the time it takes for Bridge to generate them for the first time. If you watch the status bar on the bottom of the window, it should detail how many previews it is working on generating. At least it does for the Windows version, I don't know for sure regarding Mac.

Thanks for the input. I screwed around a bit with it some more this evening, checking the settings juice mentioned. I've noticed the blur is more pronounced on a full-screen preview. While in Bridge, if I highlight an image and press spacebar, the preview is often blurry. Even after waiting a second or two for the preview to fully render. Most everything I shoot is 18MP, I'm not sure if it will do this with smaller images. I'll have to mess with it some more.

I was hoping there was some obscure radio button or checkbox that I didn't have checked that would solve this problem...

Does the same for me, more so on my slow laptop than on the desktop.

Right under the heading Metadata there are 2 boxes and a down arrow. Click on the down arrow and change your thumbnail settings.

Mine did this till I upgraded my ram. Was purely a hardware problem for me. I guess having PS5 open, multiple images, bridge open. having it give me a preview while running the normal background crap was too much strain.

bohdank wrote in post #11429895
Right under the heading Metadata there are 2 boxes and a down arrow. Click on the down arrow and change your thumbnail settings.

OK, so I played around a bit with these settings. (Never would have known what they are if you hadn't said anything.) My monitor doesn't have the height to display 100% image from my 7D. Its showing it at just under 100% when I hit spacebar to preview it. If I zoom in just a bit, it goes to 100% and the image clears right up.

If you hit space bar which puts you in full screen, you just need to click on the image for it to go to 100%, then wait for the "loading" message at the top of the screen to go away.

You know, I didn't even know about hitting the spacebar thing, so I learned something also

I just upgraded from CS3 to CS5.

I first was shocked by the poor quality previews.

I tried the "generate monitor sized previews" menu.

This works.

But you need to purge the cache before you see improvements. The menu text to "generate monitor sized previews" suggests the cache will be cleared upon new start-up - but this is not the case.

Once I cleared the cache I got my good preview quality back.


The preview quality has improved over CS3 and is now very close to what you see in Photoshop. A serious improvement over Bridge CS3.

Bridge CS3 was a dog, buggy and unreliable. CS4 was much better, I haven't tried CS5 yet.

Bit of a re-visit to this post.

The blurry fullscreen previews in Bridge drove me crazy. Now I know it wasn't only me. Scott Kelby listed this flaw as the #1 reason to switch to LR. Glad I already did.

http://www.photoshopus​er.com/lightroom