23 February 2014

[photo] Adobe's DNG Converter … When Your Camera Raw is Too Uncooked

3027.
A few pictures in the last missive needed some additional, can you believe it, preprocessing before I could load them into Photoshop, something that took me by surprise.

It's the magic of competing formats. You have a lot of formats out there, not all are created equal, and everyone has their own way of doing things. The upside of this is that you have a lot of innovation. The downside is that your application might not be able to read the photo you took.

The Canon PowerShot 100S takes pictures almost too many ways to count. If you like setting your own options, the camera will, rather than .JPG, generate what's called a .CR2 file, which I take to be Canon's native Camera Raw format. I try to read this into Adobe Photoshop CS4 for my usual sizing before posting them to the blog … and though CS4 has recognized Camera Raw in the past, this one, it doesn't. I understand CS6 does, but that's not on the agenda yet and may not be, our shoestring being what it is, and I'm not in the class that can support the Creative Cloud (and I'm not that awestruck by the concept).

So, what to do? Seems a shame to waste those image files.

As it happens, there's an evolving universal standard, the .DNG file, or 'Digital Negative'. It's a standardization of Camera Raw, apparently, that CS4 can read.

And, thankfully, Adobe … the company that is good at standards, anyway, (thank you PDF) has a handy-dandy program that will convert your .CR2 files to .DNG, which Photoshop CS4 likes just fine.

To download the Mac version, good for Mac OS X 10.6-current (thankfully), go to this link:

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=5695&promoid=DTEHQ

It's about 145 MB and it's also free and works a treat on those files.

Yeah, it's just one more step. But, it works.

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