There's an issue with the most recent update on Adobe's Camera RAW version 11.4.1 - It's only a minor issue but for those of you out there who blanket wash their whole Adobe Bridge selection edit and hit 'Auto' to balance their image settings, you'll quickly find you can't.

Adobe CC Camera RawUpdate notification to version 11.4.1

What do I mean by this?

Not everyone uses Adobe Bridge the way I do, most prefer to use Adobe's LightRoom to manage their images, I fell into using Bridge because it was part of Photoshop, it can almost do everything LightRoom can do, and it was free with Photoshop so why buy something extra if you don't have to?

It's worked well for me over the years, it's not perfect but it can really get you out of a jam when you've under-exposed a shot just a tad too much, it handles noise really well if you know what you're doing, and if all else fails, you can quickly desaturate and boom, you have a Black & White image in less than a second.

My usual process post-shoot is to put all my cards into their own folders. They might not be in the right order, especially if its a wedding shoot, but I have a fix for that, by syncronising the camera clocks before I take the lens caps off, more on that later.

1. Open each folder in Bridge and STAR rate the ones I like the most. 1 STAR if it makes the cut, 2 STARS if I need to do an edit in Photoshop after I'm done with Camera Raw.
2. Move all the STAR rated images into a new folder where they will then start the process of fast edits.
3. Repeat the process for all the images in each of the folders, however many you have: STAR, Move.
4. Open the Master Edit folder you moved all those selected images into.
5. CTRL/CMD+A in Adobe Bridge - Then CTRL/CMD+R - This will open Camera RAW

Auto function in Camera RawSelect All, then select Auto

That's me and the wife and our buddy Izzy from our trip to Bulgaria a few months ago.

ANYWAY...

6. I then select all the images (CTRL/CMD+A) and set about letting Camera Raw automatically correcting the exposure. Most of the time it has very little to do, but as you know, clouds can get in front of the sun and you might forget to correct properly in that short period of time. Camera Raw can help you out.
7. If I have a selection of images that have been taken indoors, what I will tend to do is find a white object in one of those series of images and then use that as the 'Selected Picture', the one I can see on the screen, then on the images above and below, I'll mass select them, and White Balance them based on that white object.

I think go through more corrections and lens distortion adjustments etc.

Synchronize OptionsThe other work around that didn't work The problem recently has been that when I selected ALL of my images and then used the 'Auto' function, it would only update the first image and ignore the others.

I trawled through the internet boards to see what everyone else was doing, with no real solution to the one I was used to.

Some suggested I use the Synchronize feature within Raw, which in theory works great if all your images are within the same sort of framing, lighting and environment.

IF they're not, however, well, they all get exactly the same settings from that one image you can see on the screen.

So, what has happened to the AUTO feature?

Okay, so why is it so important that I've created this blog post about it? When you're dealing with hundreds of pictures each day, time is of the essence. Time is what sets me apart from other photographers, as I want my clients to have their images within the shortest time frames possible. Weddings are especially critical to me, as I promise to have a couples wedding day images available to them before they've had their breakfast, 99% of the time that happens, it's only on the rare occasions where I'm travelling long distances between weddings where I might need an extra day or two.

The AUTO feature scans the individual image and highly complicated algorithms extrapolate all the pixel information to balance them out to their natural exposure rate as compared to its surrounding pixels.

I'll still go in and individually adjust each image, but if they've already been auto-exposed, I can quickly see what I'm dealing with and adjust only the tiniest of elements as Camera Raw has done all the heavy lifting for me.

All this stopped with and update, version 11.4.1 - Auto in all its glory, simply stopped working on mass. It would work on an individual scale, but on mass, no.

Have Adobe in their infinite wisdom decided to limit this feature? Seems not. One such senior admin on one of the forums admitted it was a glitch in the update, one that would be remedied in the next one, however, they gave no indication as to when this would happen, surfice to say, the only option left to all of us who use this feature, was to roll back to the previous update.

Let the hunt for this update begin. https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/camera-raw/kb/camera-raw-plug-in-installer.html

Okay, so I did all the hunting for you. With other apps within your CC Subscription, you can dial it back to the previous version. As Camera Raw is technically a plugin, you can simply download that previous version and overwrite the current one. What I would also suggest you do, once you've done that, is turn off Auto Update as a choice on Creative Cloud app manager. You'll get update notifications from time to time, just remember to keep a close eye on what update number it is in the hope they fix this issue in the next version.