Month: November 2008

The Camera Raw 5.2 and DNG Converter 5.2 are now available on Adobe.com.(For Photoshop CS4 customers I recommend choosing the ‘Updates…’ option from the Help menu)  This release includes additional features and new camera support.  Lightroom will be updated to version 2.2 in December to provide the equivalent camera support.

New in this release:

• Targeted Adjustment Tool for on image adjustments
• Output sharpening for print or screen output
• Snapshots for saving all settings in a single reference
• Camera Profiles for enhanced raw file interpretation now available in the Calibration panel

Newly supported camera models:

• Canon EOS 5D Mark II
• Canon PowerShot G10
• Panasonic DMC-G1**
• Panasonic DMC-FX150**
• Panasonic DMC-FZ28**
• Panasonic DMC-LX3**
• Leica D-LUX 4**

**With the release of Camera Raw 5.2 (and upcoming Lightroom 2.2 release) there is an important exception in our DNG file handling for the Panasonic DMC LX3, Panasonic DMC FX150, Panasonic DMC FZ28, Panasonic DMC-G1 and Leica D-LUX 4. In this release the native, proprietary files from these cameras can only be converted to linear DNG files. A linear DNG file has gone through a demosaic process that converts a single mosaic layer of red, green and blue channel information into three distinct layers , one for each channel. The resulting linear DNG file is approximately three times the size of a mosaic DNG file or the original proprietary file format.

This exception is a temporary solution to ensure that Panasonic and Leica’s intended image rendering from their proprietary raw file format is applied to an image when converted DNG files are viewed in third party software titles. The same image rendering process is applied automatically in Camera Raw 5.2 and in Lightroon 2.2 when viewing the original proprietary raw file format.

In a future release Adobe plans to update the DNG specification to include an option to embed metadata-based representations of the lens compensations in the DNG file, allowing a mosaic DNG conversion. In the interim Adobe recommends only converting these files to DNG to allow compatibility with third party raw converters, previous versions of the Camera Raw plug-in or previous versions of Lightroom.

Last year John was kind enough to post an entry on his blog about how Aperture and Lightroom were faring in the pro community. The results as published by InfoTrends, an independent research firm, were conclusive in that Lightroom was the application of choice for pro photographers.(after Photoshop of course)   InfoTrends has repeated the survey and the results are even more telling.  Here are the results for both 2007 and 2008.

Question:  What camera raw conversion software does your company use? Please check all that apply.

	2007	2008
Photoshop Camera Raw Plug-in	66.5%	62.2%
Lightroom	23.6%	35.9%
Aperture	5.5%	7.5%
On the Mac Platform Only
Lightroom	26.6%	40.4%
Aperture	14.3%	14.6%

Even when we remove the Windows responses from the survey, it’s clear that Lightroom is preferred by a large margin over Aperture.

Ultimately numbers are just numbers so please draw your own conclusion but from my perspective, the professional community has already decided that products from the Photoshop family remain their tools of choice.

Footnotes: 

• This research is not available free of charge so we needed InfoTrend’s permission to share a small portion of the results. 
• The survey was conducted in North America in June & July of 2008, prior to the release of Lightroom 2. 
• One question that should immediately spring to mind is how did the Mac only usage stay static while Aperture’s overall usage increased?  There was an increase in the number of respondents who are using the Mac platform relative to 2007 so even though the percentage of those using Aperture on the Mac remained constant, the rise in Mac usage overall brought up the total number of Aperture users in the market.