Today’s Question: Is there a way to skip the intermediate Camera Raw screen and go directly to the DNG file I will work on in Photoshop?
Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, you can skip the Camera Raw dialog in Photoshop by holding the Shift key while opening an image from the File > Open dialog or from Adobe Bridge.
More Detail: When you open a raw capture in Photoshop, the Camera Raw dialog will come up so you can adjust the settings for the processing of that raw image before opening the rendered result in Photoshop. Adobe DNG (digital negative) files are treated like raw captures, even though they might have been created after the photo capture process and are therefore opened via Camera Raw as well.
If you don’t need to process (or modify) the image with Camera Raw, you can indeed bypass Camera Raw and open the image directly in Photoshop. To do so, you can hold the Shift key while either opening the image via the dialog when you choose the File > Open command from within Photoshop, or when you double-click an image in Adobe Bridge to open it in Photoshop.
When you bypass the Camera Raw interface in this way, that doesn’t mean the Camera Raw adjustments aren’t applied. It just means you don’t have the opportunity to update the adjustment settings for the image. If you had previously adjusted the raw or DNG image with Camera Raw, the adjustment settings you used previously will apply as the image is opened. If you hadn’t previously processed the image with Camera Raw the default settings will be used to render the image via Camera Raw even though you don’t see the dialog in this scenario.
