2 questions, will begin with the easiest one:
1. The photoshop interface (CS3) turned white. How can I turn it back to black? It's difficult to work on photos with that (blinding) white background; and
2. For whatever reason, Camera Raw will no longer open nef files, and Adobe Bridge will no longer create thumbnails of .nef files.

Please advise.

This is a quote from one of my old books. I don't know if it will work on newer versions of Photoshop or not. It won't hurt to try.

"If a gray surround isn't your taste, just change the foreground color and then grab the Paint Bucket tool and Shift-click in the gray area to change it. Not that too many people know this trick, so you can use it to mess with your coworkers' minds. Just set the color to an irritating color such as fluorescent green." Ben Willmore

Good luck,

Janet

You may want to go into Bridge's Preferences and Under Cache>Purge Cashe. That may help. Also, make sure you are running the latest update to Bridge. It has been patched several times since the initial release.

In CS2 the shift-click trick works in full-screen and other non-standard views but when I switch back to standard view it reverts to gray. In that mode the background appears to be controlled by Windows (XP in my case) and the only way I can find to change it is through display properties.

2 questions, will begin with the easiest one:
1. The photoshop interface (CS3) turned white. How can I turn it back to black? It's difficult to work on photos with that (blinding) white background; and
2. For whatever reason, Camera Raw will no longer open nef files, and Adobe Bridge will no longer create thumbnails of .psd files.

Please advise.

PJ, with CS3 open, look under Windows->Workspace and choose Default Workspace (or your own workspace if you have set one up before and saved it with a name). Also, if you right-click on the work-area, you should get choices of color -- gray, black, and custom - lets you choose from color picker. Not sure if it stays after you close out a session, but you can save your workspace and that might hold it -- I'm working on something right now and don't want to try it out. Also remember that there are different "Screen modes" - click "F" to change from one to another -- one is set for black, but perhaps one got changed to white in your setup? Hope it helps.

As for the .nef and .psd files, check your Edit->Preferences->File Type Associations in Adobe Bridge to see what the settings are for .nef (Nikon Electronic Format) and .psd files (Photoshop documents files).

Hi Janet, that didn't work. Unless I have a photo open, the paint bucket doesn't operate. Any other suggestions?

Thanks for the Camera Raw solution. It worked great! Now I can open .dng and .nef files. However, I still can't view .nef or .dng files with Adobe Bridge.

...In that mode the background appears to be controlled by Windows (XP in my case) and the only way I can find to change it is through display properties.

Exactly...
Video Properties>Appearance -> Advanced -> Application Background
(The names might differ slightly - my XP speaks Portuguese)

Rô

Video Properties? You must have CS3 extended. I should be so lucky. In the case that you don't have that (extremely expensive) software, but only CS3, what would you do?

Sorry, like I said my XP speaks Portuguese, "Video properties" was just a rough translation to English.
That would be "Display" - or what you get right-clicking on the desktop. :bigthmb:

Rô