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Adobe hopes Lightroom intercepts photo trends

With Adobe Systems' release of version 2 of its Photoshop Lightroom on Monday night, the company no doubt hopes customers will be drawn by a number of new features in the software for sorting, cataloging, and editing photos.

But the company believes an external factor will also help the software: the booming sales of high-end SLR cameras. These high-end models are helping usher in many of digital photography's biggest changes, and Adobe is trying to intercept the trend with Lightroom.

From 2007 to 2008, digital SLR shipments increased a dramatic 41 percent to 7.5 million units, according to market researcher IDC. And though plenty of those cameras went to gadget-happy doctors or to snapshooters who won't exploit the cameras' full features, plenty of others went to the photography enthusiasts at whom Lightroom is aimed.

"Prices are coming down, so more people with entry-level SLRs are experimenting," said Tom Hogarty, the Adobe senior product manager in charge of Lightroom. "If you pick up the camera for the sake of creating an artistic thing and not just recording a family event, you've really taken the plunge into serious photography. Anyone at that level is an ideal Lightroom customer."

One significant feature common to SLRs is the ability to shoot "raw" photos--the images taken directly from the image sensors without the camera baking in its own assumptions about what's right.… Read more

Adobe releases DNG codec for Vista, updates spec

Today, Adobe made several announcements relating to its Digital Negative format (DNG) including the availability of the 32-bit Vista codec. You can download it here.

Adobe positions DNG, which is actually a flavor of TIFF, as a nonproprietary alternative to the variety of camera raw formats used by most of the major dSLR manufacturers, including Canon, Nikon, Sony, and Olympus. Later-to-market entrants, like Samsung's GX models and Casio's Exilim Pro EX-F1, have embraced DNG. As Stephen Shankland alluded in a previous post, according to Kevin Connor, Adobe's director of product management for Professional Digital Imaging, Adobe has … Read more

Adobe toys with standardizing DNG raw photo format

Adobe Systems is discussing potential standardization of its Digital Negative (DNG) format for digital images, a company executive has said.

Most people are fine with plain-old JPEG for their images, but higher-end cameras can produce more flexible and higher-quality "raw" photos that are encoded with camera makers' proprietary formats. Because different cameras produce different formats, companies such as Adobe whose software deals with raw files face a daunting engineering challenge understanding.

DNG is designed as an alternative to the profusion--what Adobe calls a Tower of Babel--but it hasn't caught on widely. Ricoh, Casio, Pentax, and a few … Read more

Microsoft hopes new photo tool will boost Windows

Microsoft likes digital photography enthusiasts as customers, and on Thursday plans to release a free new utility designed to keep them wedded to Windows.

Pro Photo Tools is geared for photography professionals and enthusiasts, and its first notable feature is the ability to geotag photos, or add geographic information showing where the picture was taken. Geotagging is an onerous chore with today's technology, but camera makers are working to build it into cameras, and it can pay off down the road.

That's because geotagging, done well, enables people to find photos by searching for the word "Paris&… Read more

Power Downloader, file format master

Power Downloader tries his best to help all, but recently his friend Francois Foto approached him with a tricky problem: is there a way to easily convert photos from one format to another? ''Ze emphasees,'' said Francois, ''eez on easy.'' Power had a simple solution, a freeware program called XnView.

XnView is a robust program, an image browser and viewer as well as a converter. For conversions, though, it can handle more than 400 formats from Camera RAW, JPG, GIF, TIFF, and other still image formats all the way through AVI, MOV, MPEG, and a multitude of movie formats. Metadata … Read more

Adobe releases debugged Lightroom 1.4.1

Correction, 5:30 p.m. PDT: This blog initially misstated the day Adobe released Photoshop Lightroom 1.4.1. It is Thursday.

After a debugging session to fix problems with the flawed 1.4.0, Adobe Systems on Thursday released Photoshop Lightroom 1.4.1.

Raw images from higher-end digital cameras have more flexibility and quality than JPEGs, but also require processing in a computer to convert to more useful formats. Lightroom handles that task, along with cataloging and other chores. Adobe also released the corresponding version 4.4.1 of Adobe Camera Raw, the raw-image converter plug-in for regular … Read more

Adobe's Lightroom 2 beta broadens editing horizons

Update 6:40 AM PDT: I added some links to Adobe information and further detailed some new features.

When Adobe Systems launched Photoshop Lightroom, it presented users with an all-or-nothing photo editing philosophy. But with version 2, which goes into public beta testing Wednesday, the company is changing course.

Lightroom 2 offers local editing abilities that permit photographers to edit just a patch of an image--whitening a person's teeth, deepening the blue of a sky, illuminating a child in a tree's shadow. Changes are "painted" on with a variably sized circular brush.

Local editing doesn't … Read more

Google gives respite from a raw camera deal

I was in a pinch a few weeks ago, and Google's Picasa software saved my skin. But now my warm glow of gratitude has begun wearing off, replaced by a simmering annoyance with camera makers for their profusion of proprietary raw formats.

Let me explain. I was covering the Photo Marketing Association trade show in Las Vegas, toting my Canon EOS Rebel XT camera to photograph products and people. For my personal photography I usually shoot in raw format to maximize the detail and flexibility, but for work purposes I use JPEG because it's faster to process and … Read more

Poll: Which is better, Aperture or Lightroom?

The good news is that there's some competition again for software to edit and catalog raw images, the detailed and flexible file formats from higher-end cameras. The bad news is that anybody buying the software has a harder choice to make.

With the new Aperture now available and Lightroom just celebrating its first birthday, I thought it opportune to survey readers. What would you buy? What would you advise somebody else?

Please vote in the poll here, and share your reasoning in the Talkback section below to enlighten others.

Photographers would be best to think carefully about which software … Read more